Is your WordPress site legal? Do you know if you are breaking any rules or regulations, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any third-party companies whose products or services you are recommending or using?
Internet laws and regulations are designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who sells, markets or promotes products and services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law will not prevent someone from taking legal action against your business.
Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for profit, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the (US based) Better Business Bureau, also referred to as the BBB. Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
These laws has consequences for several online business activities, including:
- Any kind of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords or AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creators
- Bloggers
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal could shut down your account, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a range of advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to expensive litigation.
This article explains why it’s important to have a compliant website and explains simple and inexpensive methods and solutions to make your site legally compliant quickly and easily.
Does Your Website Comply With All Legal Requirements?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. As stated above, the purpose of this article is only to make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal requirements in accordance with the laws governing business online and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of companies whose services or products you use on your website
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Is your business at risk? Consider what could happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- Someone has a heart attack after they use your online fitness workout.
- The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate gives someone skin rashes.
- You’ve told subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not clearly spelled out what you will do with the information you’ve collected.
- Someone copies content from your website and puts it up on their website.
- You haven’t informed your site users that you are an affiliate for the product you are promoting and may earn financial benefits if visitors buy it.
- You didn’t spell out the conditions of your return policies.
- Online visitors claim that your testimonials are false and try to sue you.
- You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your site publishes adult content and you have not taken sufficient measures to keep underage persons from accessing it.
Consider also these actual case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would have to give up their personal information to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer was slapped with a whopping $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 prohibits using software that scrapes Users IDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independent 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites picked at random, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% had infringed at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in violation of at least 3 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 cautions or lose access entirely to the Google program they had violated, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how a website owner can easily be exposed to the risk of non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA, CPC or PPA Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Marketer
- AdWords Advertiser
- Niche Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Freelancer, Coach or Consultant
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
it’s important to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your online business stays fully compliant with the law.
Complying With Third-Party Companies Terms And Policies
Complying with third-party companies terms and policies is important.
You are required to let your site users know that your website complies with legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only increases trust and confidence in your site, it’s also required in most cases by most companies you do business with.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires websites to display legal information if using many of their products. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Earning revenue with your sites with Google AdSense ads …
(Google AdSense ads - policy requirements)
Or promoting your products using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you plan to sell products online through places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you are required to add various legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale in their network …
(Policy requirements for selling through ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and disclosures to visitors, especially regarding the use of product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant
New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will reveal that many sites are still unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As is already the case, this typically ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting 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 any chances. Even if your business is not located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by making sure that your website complies with all FTC regulations.
Various business resources provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help you meet FTC requirements. See the additional references and useful resources section at the end of this article for more information …
(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of laws and regulations)
Social Media Applications Also Require Compliance
If you are planning to develop apps that integrate with your site, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others with access to various legal pages …
(Apps that interface with social networking sites also require compliance)
- If you are not sure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting services or products online via affiliate marketing, or generate revenue online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or using Google AdWords pay-per-click ads to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to display on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts suspended.
- If you have ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party services require you to comply with their policies)
What Legal Pages Do You Need To Add To Your Website To Be Compliant?
If you suspect that your website is lacking in terms of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should help your website stay out of trouble with most consumer protection agencies and third-party providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues):
- About Us
- Contact Us
- Privacy Statement
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above pages, you may want to consider adding one or more of the pages listed below if applicable:
- Affiliate Agreement (e.g. if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Links Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website provides financial information)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Video/Audio Terms (if you allow media downloads on your site)
Types Of Disclosure Pages
Adding correct web content disclosure information is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs site users that you will not receive for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Lets visitors know that you may be compensated if they purchase through an affiliate link.
- Sample/Review Copy – Lets users be aware that you have received a review or sample copy of the product or service by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Informs visitors that you have been compensated in some way to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs visitors that you’re using online behavioral tracking technology. This is required to comply with the “enhanced notice” the Better Business Bureau has been requiring website publishers to display prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
How To Add Legal Content To Your WordPress Website
Ideally, you should have your lawyer prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Upload Legal Web Pages Manually To Your Website
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 them for you.
We recommend creating a legals directory on your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder using FTP …
(Upload legal pages to your web server using FTP)
You can then easily add a link to your pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …
(WordPress Menu)
Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your WordPress sidebar (or place them in the footer of your site) so that visitors have access to legal information from all pages …
(Display links to your legal information to users on all of your site’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial about adding links to pages on your sidebar menu and footer in WordPress here:
Templates
You can find attorney-drafted downloadable website forms and agreements just by searching online, or visiting sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
More info:
Alternatively, you can purchase a package of legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert to protect businesses online …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages)
Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with search and replace to insert your own business name and URL, then pasted into your web pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Page Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance
- Privacy Policy: Google, DART, etc.
- Terms of Service (ToS) & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page for every legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload the pages to your server as described earlier.
Go here for more information:
Plugins – Legal Pages
In addition to using copy & paste legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use plugins.
Here are some great WordPress plugins worth looking into:
WP Legal Pages
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)
If manually setting up legal pages for your site feels too time-consuming for you, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages instead …
WP Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you loads of headaches.
Some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages plugin are:
- Built-in Templates – Over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very 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.
- Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like every other page on your website.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – Add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when published.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any page on your site.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. Page unlocks and can be accessed only when users agree to your legal terms.
- Additional Features – The plugin is updated with new features when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will display inside your WordPress dashboard section …
(WP Legal Pages – Legal Pages Menu)
This lets you create, edit and view your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Screen)
The plugin gives you the option of creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, review websites, Amazon sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages – Page type drop down menu)
Select from several pre-configured legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal 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 about using this WordPress plugin, visit this website:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
complete website compliance & disclaimer solution …
Go here to learn more:
Legal Suite Pro
(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 & Conditions
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin – 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress 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.
More information:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal documentation is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some form of basic legal protection on your website until you can afford a solicitor.
We want your website to be legally safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator tool below (it’s FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal page templates, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator lets you quickly generate necessary legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you are making money online, it’s important that your site stays compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online and any guidelines and terms of service required by third-party sites that you may be promoting or selling online. Your internet presence must comply with various regulations, many of which you may not be aware of.
Being non-compliant 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, we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice in this article. You are strongly advised to do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with the law pertaining to your specific business.
Legal Resources
Below is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to better understand what your site may require to remain compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- FTC Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- Federal Trade Commission Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program
- 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
- US Copyright Office
Additionally …
- 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
- Google AdWords Help – What to include in your privacy policy for remarketing
- ClickBank – Creating Your First Product
- Facebook Platform Policies
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand the importance of having a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website or blog using simple and cost-effective methods and resources.
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"Wow! I never knew there's so much to learn about WordPress! I bought one of the WordPress for Dummies three years ago, such authors need to be on this course!" - Rich Law, Create A Blog Now