Is your WordPress website compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking the law, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose services or products you do business with?
As the digital realm continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game keep changing, it’s absolutely vital that you try to stay on top of what’s happening and ensure that your website or blog remains compliant, especially if your web presence plays an important part in your business strategy.
New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for material gain, you will need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the (US based) Better Business Bureau (BBB). Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Better Business Bureau)
These laws affect several online business categories, including:
- Any form of advertising, including Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
If you do not display certain legal pages on your website (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could close down your account, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote various advertising or online merchant networks.
If your business online is not compliant, you could also end up facing a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
This article explains the importance of having a compliant website and how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple solutions.
Is Your Website Or Blog Breaking Rules Or Regulations?
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice about your website or business. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law concerning your specific business.
Understanding The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Consider for one moment what the implications to your business would be if these scenarios were to take place:
- A user suffers a heart attack after purchasing your online workout program.
- The skin care lotion you promote as an affiliate marketer gives people an adverse reaction.
- You’ve informed your subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not spelled out exactly what you’ll do with it.
- Someone steals your content and publishes it on their own site.
- There is no statement on your website making visitors aware that you are an affiliate for the product you are recommending and may get paid an affiliate commission if they purchase it.
- You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your refund or return policies.
- A visitor claims that your testimonials are fake and decides to sue you because of it.
- You did not disclose that you have received a free copy in your product review.
- Your website includes adult-related content and you did not take sufficient measures to restrict access by underage children.
Consider also these actual examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would be required to give up their personal information to complete an offer they were promoting. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer received a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private information about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% had infringed at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were breaking at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had breached at least three of Google’s policies. Although the website owners could technically be sued by Google, more than likely what could happen, is that they would be issued with warnings or lose access to the Google program whose policies they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how easy it is to risk being targeted for non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- Network Marketer
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords User
- Niche Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
It’s vitally important to ensure that your website or blog has the right legal pages and clearly displayed to all site users.
Compliance With 3rd-Party Companies - ToS, Policies, etc.
Compliance with third-party services terms and policies is important.
You are expected to let your site visitors know that your business complies with legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your site, it’s also required by most companies you engage with.
For example:
Google requires you to display certain information when using many of their products. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Earning revenue online with your website with Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense display advertising - policy requirements)
And even promoting your products through Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell digital products via merchants like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add legal pages to your website before they will approve your products for sale …
(Policy requirements for vendors selling through ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and policies on your site, especially if you plan to sell products with the aid of testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant
New FTC regulations governing the conduct of businesses online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this often prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies for breaches of regulation in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any type of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business interests by ensuring that your website is compliant with FTC regulations.
There are many online business resources that can provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the references and resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)
Don’t Forget Social Media Apps
If you are planning to create applications that will integrate with your site, sites like Twitter, Facebook, and others require you to provide access to your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting products or services online using affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or driving visitors to your site with Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)
What Compliance Information Pages Does My Website Need To Be Legally Compliant?
If your website is lacking in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following compliance pages to your site should keep your business out of trouble with most consumer protection authorities and external providers, and avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “cease and desist” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Additionally, you may want to look into including one or more of the pages listed below:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you sell or promote affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Links Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general content about financial areas or money-making opportunities)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Video/Audio Terms Of Use (e.g. if you allow users to download media on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding the right type of web content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Discloses to users that you will not receive any kind of compensation for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your visitors know that you will derive some form of financial benefit if they act on your recommendation and purchase through your affiliate link.
- Sample Or review Copy – Discloses to your readers that you have received a sample or review copy of the product you’re writing about.
- Sponsored Post – Informs visitors that you were compensated in some way to write the content.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets users know that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to satisfy the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring online publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Compliance Pages To Your WordPress Website
Ideally, you will have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Pages To Your Site
If someone prepares and delivers the legal content for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend creating a legals directory on your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory (e.g. via FTP) …
(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)
You can then add a link to your legal pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …
(WordPress Menu)
Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and clearly visible to all site visitors. You can insert these into your sidebar (or the footer section of your site) so that visitors will be able to access the information from every web page …
(It’s important to display links to legal pages to users on all of your website’s pages)
If you need help adding links to pages on your sidebar menu using widgets, refer to this step-by-step tutorial:
Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-prepared forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to websites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
(FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-drafted legal forms)
More info:
Another option is to download a set of legal templates designed by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)
Cut & Paste website legal templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with simple search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your legal pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Forms include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- ToS & Conditions of Use: with inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.
You can either create a new page for each legal form you want added to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your server as described earlier.
More info:
Legal Pages – Plugins
As well as using legal templates, you can keep things very simple using a plugin.
Here are some great legal WordPress plugins worth looking into:
WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress
(WordPress Plugin – WordPress Legal Pages)
If the idea of manually creating legal pages for your website seems too time-consuming for you, then consider using WP Legal Pages instead …
This plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site much easier and save you a great deal of time and effort.
Some of the benefits of using WordPress Legal Pages are:
- Built-in Legal Templates – Over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the basic legal pages you need in a few minutes with just a few mouse clicks.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like any page on your site.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page lock down. When a user agrees to your legal terms, the page unlocks.
- New Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will display inside your navigation menu …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from the admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
You can create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, niche sites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Type of Site drop down menu)
You can also choose from various pre-configured legal templates …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Built-In Templates)
Legal page templates include:
- Terms of Use (Users are forced to agree to Terms and Conditions before using site)
- Linking Policy
- External Links Policy
- Terms and Conditions
- Refund Policy
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Privacy Policy
- Affiliate Agreement
- Facebook Privacy Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- Antispam Policy
- DoubleClick DART Cookies Policy
- Disclaimer Template
- FTC Disclosure Statement Template
- Medical Disclaimer Template
- Testimonials Disclosure – As per FTC guidelines
- Amazon Affiliate Disclosure Template
- DMCA Policy Template
- California Privacy Rights Policy Template
- Digital Goods Refund Policy Template
- COPPA – Children’s Online Privacy Policy Template
- Blog Comments Policy Template
- Newsletter Subscription Policy and Disclaimer Template
- FTC Disclaimer Widget
To learn more this WordPress plugin, go here:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Compliance Plugin
complete website compliance & disclaimer solution …
More info:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro)
Legal Suite Pro lets you easily install professionally-written legal pages such as:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- DMCA Compliance
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Social Media Disclosure
- Medical Disclaimer
- Terms of Service
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress – Professionally-written legal forms)
Additionally:
- Drag & Drop FTC Disclaimer Widget: Add an FTC Disclaimer to any WordPress sidebar or widget area.
- Customizable EU Cookie Compliance Bar: Display an EU cookie compliance bar if you are getting traffic from the EU and your sites use cookies.
With just one-click you can install almost all of the legal pages your site needs and these professionally written legal pages can be created in your theme and/or as a standalone page outside of your theme.
The plugin developers have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered site. You can have legal pages installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.
For more details, visit this site:
If using the services of legal experts to create your legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing some basic type of legal protection on your site until you can afford a solicitor.
We want your business to be protected!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal documentation, or a plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator lets you easily generate necessary legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of commercial activity online, you need to make sure that your site remains compliant with regulatory agencies and the terms of service (TOS) and guidelines for 3rd-party products and services that you may decide to promote or sell online. Your website must comply with a number of laws and regulatory guidelines, some of which you may not be aware of.
Non-compliance puts you at risk of suffering both financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice on this website. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert to ensure that your website fully complies with all legal requirements pertaining to your business.
Resources
Here is a time-saving list of websites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what may be required of your website to remain compliant and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program – Better Business Bureau
- Dot Com Disclosures: Information About Online Advertising
- Restore Online Shoppers’ Confidence Act
- CAN-SPAM Act Guide
- Children’s Online Privacy Protection Rule
- FTC Regulatory Review Web Page
- FTC Rules and Guides Currently Under Review
- The Department of Commerce Internet Policy Task Force – Commercial Data Privacy and Innovation in the Internet Economy: A Dynamic Policy Framework
- FTC Staff Report: Self-Regulatory Principles for Online Behavioral Advertising
- FTC Final Guides Governing Endorsements and Testimonials
- US Patent and Trademark Office
- United States Copyright Office
Plus …
- Google Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- AdSense Help – Required Content
- Google AdWords – Information Collection And Use
- AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
- ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
- Facebook Platform Policies
We hope you have found this article useful and that it has helped you understand why it’s important to have a compliant website. Use the information provided above to quickly add essential legal pages to your WordPress website.
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"I am beyond impressed with what you have put together. I can tell that you put a ton of hard work into building what you have. You have the absolute best content on WordPress I have ever seen!" - Robert T. Jillie