One of the worst things that can happen to you as a website owner is to break the law.
Internet laws and regulations were designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to any person who markets, sells or promotes products or services online. Anyone who owns a website risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t protect you from being slapped with a legal notice.
New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you plan to promote anything on your website for commercial gain, then you must follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the (US based) Better Business Bureau (BBB). Look up “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(BBB – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of new laws affect various online business categories, including:
- Any type of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketing
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
If your site does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to list digital products for sale, PayPal could suspend your account, Facebook will reject your applications, and you won’t be allowed to promote a range of advertising or affiliate marketing networks.
If your website is not compliant, you could also end up facing a number 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 add legal pages to your WordPress website.
Does Your Site Comply With The Law?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice. You must carry out your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with the law wherever your business is located.
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Is your business at risk? Consider what would happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- A person suffers a heart attack after purchasing your online fitness program.
- The skin cream you sell as an affiliate marketer gives someone skin rashes.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not spelled out exactly what you will do with their personal details.
- Someone steals your content and publishes it on their site.
- There is no statement on your website informing your visitors that you are an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing that you will get paid a commission if they buy it.
- You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your return policies.
- A visitor claims the testimonials on your site are misleading and decides to sue you because of it.
- You haven’t disclosed that you have received a free copy in a product review.
- Your site includes adult information and you have not taken appropriate measures to keep underage children from accessing it.
Consider now the actual examples of costly compliance breaches below:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up their personal information (including credit card info to complete a debt reduction offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer copped a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private information.
- 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 independently-conducted 2010 study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% had breached 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 breach of 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 notices or lose access entirely to the Google program with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).
Can you see how a business owner can easily become exposed to the risks of litigation?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Niche Publisher
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Adult Content Publisher
- Provider Of Freelance, Consulting Or Coaching Services
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
You need to make sure that your website remains fully compliant with the law.
Complying With 3rd-Party Services
Compliance with third-party services terms and policies is important.
You must let your visitors know that your business complies with legal requirements and recommended guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of many companies you do business with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires websites to display legal information when using many of their services and features. This includes Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Monetizing your WordPress sites with Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense advertising - policy requirements)
And even promoting your products or services via Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you sell information-based products via companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add legal pages before they will approve your products for sale in their network …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policy statements on your website, especially when concerning the use of product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensuring That Your Site Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many business are unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has already been the case, this often ends up with the FTC making an example of businesses and prosecuting companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you plan to do any kind of selling online, therefore, it’s best not to take any chances. Even if your business does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business by ensuring that your website is compliant with FTC regulations.
There are many sites that can provide guidelines and examples on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your site comply with FTC requirements. We provide references and links to additional resources to a number of these at the end of this article …
(Wording your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Applications - Don’t Forget These
If you are planning to develop apps that integrate with your website, you will also be required to provide sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others with information about your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure as to whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of sites like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything online using affiliate marketing, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, ads for Amazon or eBay products, or driving visitors to your website using Google AdWords, 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 shut down.
- If you have ever wondered whether “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)
Basic Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Website
If you suspect that your web site falls short in terms of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.
Adding the following legal pages to your site should help your business keep out of trouble with most regulatory authorities and 3rd-party service providers, and help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Website Disclaimer
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
Additionally, you may want to look into implementing any of the following pages:
- Affiliate Agreement (if you provide an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- Health Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides information about health or medical areas)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Video/Audio Terms (if you provide users with access to downloadable videos or audio files on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the correct type of content disclosure is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs your readers that you will not receive any type of payment for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your readers know that you will benefit financially if they purchase through affiliate links on your site.
- Sample/Review Copy – Explains to readers that you have received a review or sample copy of the product.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that informs your visitors that you were compensated in some form to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Lets users know 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.
Adding Legal Pages To Your Website
Ideally, you will have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once this has been created, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Pages Manually To Your Site
If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in typical web page format (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your site, or have someone upload these pages for you.
We recommend adding a legal directory to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this directory using FTP …
(Upload legal pages to your web server via FTP)
You can then easily add a link to these legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu admin area …
(WordPress Menu)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are up-to-date and clearly visible to all visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into the sidebar menu (or place them in the footer section of your website or blog) to ensure that users will be able to access the information from every web page …
(It’s important to display links to legal information to users on all of your site’s pages)
If you need help displaying links to pages on your sidebar or footer using widgets, refer to this tutorial:
Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted website forms and agreements just by searching online, or by going to sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms – Attorney-drafted legal forms)
More information:
Alternatively, you can download a set of cut & paste legal templates written by legal attorney Scott Talbert to help businesses protect themselves online …
Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Legal Templates)
Cut & Paste website legal pages feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a simple quick search and replace to add your own business name and URL, then pasted into your pages.
The legal forms 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 (This proprietary FTC page reflects new FTC guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
- Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
- Terms of Service (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 on your website for each legal form you want to add to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload your legal pages to your server as described previously.
Go here for more information:
Legal Page Plugins
As well as using templates, you can keep things very simple using plugins.
Here are some legal plugins for WordPress sites you should check out:
WP Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Plugin – WP Legal Pages)
If you don’t want to bother with creating legal pages manually, then consider installing WP Legal Pages instead …
The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you a great deal of time.
Here are just some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages:
- Built-in Legal Templates – Over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the legal pages you will need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages just like any page on your site.
- Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
- Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any WP page.
- Forced Options – Force page or post lockdown. When users agree to the legal terms, the page unlocks.
- New Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu item will be added to your dashboard menu …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Menu)
This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from the admin area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings)
The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, affiliate/review websites, medical sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page type menu)
You can also choose from several built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages – 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
Visit the plugin site to learn more this powerful plugin:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Compliance Bar is a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your website …
For more details go here:
Legal Suite Pro Plugin
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin)
This plugin 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 Use
- Earnings Disclaimer
(Legal Suite Pro Plugin 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 secured rights to high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers and packaged them 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 less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell).
For more information, go here:
If using the services of lawyers to create your legal pages is out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic type of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance from a solicitor.
We want your business to be legally protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator tool below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal templates, or a WordPress plugin as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator quickly generates basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As stated earlier, if you engage in any form of business online, you need to make sure that your website complies with all laws and regulations and any guidelines and terms of service (TOS) of 3rd-party services and products that you may decide to promote or advertise online. If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect consumers, you’re breaking the law.
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?
Legal Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice in this article. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law in your country or region.
Resources
Here is a useful list of websites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet its legal obligations:
- Federal Trade Commission 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 – BBB
- 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
And …
- Google Analytics Help – Policy requirements for Google Analytics Advertising Features
- Google AdSense Program Policies Explained
- Google 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 presented above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple and cost-effective methods and resources.
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"These tutorials have so much information and are easy to understand. If you use WordPress or plan to in the future these will help you with everything you need to know." - Valisa (Mesa, Arizona)