How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

If you plan to grow a successful business online, you do not want to learn the hard way that you have done something illegal.

As digital business continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and rules constantly change, it’s important that you stay on top of what’s going on and make sure that your site remains legal, especially if your web presence plays a significant part in your overall business strategy.

Recent laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, 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 (BBB). Do a search online for “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.

(Better Business Bureau)

These laws affect various business activities, including:

• Any type of advertising, e.g. Google AdWords
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creation
• Bloggers
• etc.

If your website does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank or JVZoo won’t let you list digital products on their network, PayPal may suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could reject web applications, and you won’t be accepted into many advertising and online merchant networks.

You may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.

In this article, we look at the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using inexpensive solutions.

Does Your Site Comply With The Law?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not provide legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all laws wherever you do business.

Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant

Are you at risk? Consider for a minute what the implications to your business would be if any of these situations were to take place:

• Someone has a heart attack after they use your online fitness workout.
• The skin care products you promote as an affiliate gives a number of users allergic reactions.
• Your opt-in list displays a statement informing subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you plan to do with their details.
• Someone copies content from your website and publishes it on their own site.
• There is no statement on your website letting your site visitors know that you are endorsing a product as an affiliate and could get paid an affiliate commission if they buy it.
• You don’t spell out the conditions of your refund policies.
• A visitor claims that the testimonials on your site are fake and tries to sue you.
• You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
• Your website contains adult information and you haven’t taken sufficient measures to keep underaged children from accessing it.

Consider too these documented examples of costly compliance breaches:

• A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up their personal information to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
• A social networking app developer was slapped with a massive $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 users from scraping Users IDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting 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 breached 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 cautions or lose access entirely to the Google program with the violation, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to risk being a target of non-compliance?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPA, CPC or PPA Marketer
• Multilevel Marketer
• Affiliate Product Promoter
• AdWords Advertiser
• Info Product Publisher
• Amazon Associate
• EBay Seller
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online

it’s important to ensure that your website or blog stays legally compliant.

Compliance With Third-Party Companies

Leading online companies and government agencies that regulate trade emphasize the importance of observing the terms and policies of service providers.

You are required to let your visitors know that your website complies with laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases trust and buyer confidence in your site, it’s also required in many cases by most companies you interact with.

Here are just some examples:

Google requires websites to display certain information when using their services or features. This includes using Google Analytics …

(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)

Monetizing your blog with Google AdSense ads …

(Google AdSense ads policy requirements)

Or promoting your site through Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you plan to sell digital products using merchants such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant sites, you will need to add certain legal pages to your website before your products can be approved for sale in their marketplace …

(Policy requirements for ClickBank vendors)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) also requires you to display clear disclaimers and disclosures on your site, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …

(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)

FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant

FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online will easily reveal that many sites are still unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As has happened in the past, this typically prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute companies in an effort to get other businesses to comply.

If you do any kind of money-making activity online, therefore, it’s best not to take chances. Even if your business is not physically located in the U.S. we strongly recommend protecting your business interests by ensuring that your site is compliant with FTC regulations.

There are many sites that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide a number of references at the end of this article …

(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you are planning to develop applications that will integrate with your site, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and many others will require you to provide access to your legal pages …

(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)

• If you are unsure as to whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of organizations like Google, Facebook, etc., then assume that you most probably are.
• If you plan to promote anything online as an affiliate marketer, or generating revenue with Google AdSense, ads for eBay or Amazon products, or use Google AdWords pay-per-click ads to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you need to display on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
• If you’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to take proper precautions to protect yourself and your business interests.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)

Essential Legal Pages To Include In Your Website To Ensure Compliance

If you suspect that your website or blog is lacking in terms of compliance, then this section will help you.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site should help you keep out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and 3rd-party service providers, and even help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):

• About Us Page
• Contact Us
• Privacy Statement
• Terms Of Use
• Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the above pages, you may want to consider including one or more of the pages listed below:

• Affiliate Disclosure (if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Compensation Disclosure
• External Links Policy
• Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website provides financial content)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Media Terms Of Use (if you provide users with access to downloadable media on your site)

Disclosure Pages – Types

Adding the right type of disclosure to your site is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – This lets visitors be aware that you will not receive for writing the content.
• Affiliate Links – Lets site users be aware that you will derive some form of financial or similar kind of benefit if they act on your recommendation and buy through your affiliate link.
• Sample Or review Copy – Disclosure that informs readers that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets site users know that you have been compensated in some way to write the post.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs visitors 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 show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.

How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress 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 Web Pages Manually To Your Site

If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, you can simply upload these to your web server, or have someone upload them for you.

We recommend creating a legals directory in your server and uploading your legal pages to this folder (e.g. via FTP) …

(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages using FTP)

You can then add links to your pages from your WordPress site using a custom WordPress menu …

(WordPress Menu)

Where To Display Legal Pages On Your Site

Make sure that your legal pages are up-to-date and clearly visible to your visitors. You can insert links to your legal pages into your sidebar menu (or place them in the footer of your site) to ensure that users have access to legal information from every web page …

(It’s important to display links to legal pages on all of your website’s pages)

For a detailed tutorial on adding links to pages on your sidebar using widgets, see this tutorial:

• How To Add WordPress Widgets To The Blog

Ready-Made Legal Templates

You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted forms and agreements by searching online, or going to sites like the ones listed below:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

To learn more, go here:

• FindLegalForms.com

Another option is to download a set of cut and paste website legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages

(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Website Legal Pages)

These legal templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be easily customized with a simple quick search and replace to insert your own business details, then pasted into your pages.

The legal forms included in Scott Talbert’s Legal Pages include:

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• Federal Trade Commission Compliance
• Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
• ToS & Conditions of Use: includes inter- & intra-page redundancy, Contra Proferentem provision, reservation of rights, and exclusive social media admonition.

You can either create a new WordPress page for each legal form you want added to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your web pages and publish or upload the pages to your web server as previously described.

Go here for more info:

• Scott Talbert’s Legal Form Templates

Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins

In addition to using cut & paste legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use a plugin.

Here are some legal plugins for WordPress-driven websites and blogs you may be interested in using:

WP Legal Pages Plugin

(WP Legal Pages Plugin)

If manually setting up legal pages for your website feels too time-consuming for you, then consider using WordPress Legal Pages instead …

The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help make the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website a lot easier and save you time.

Some of the benefits of using the WordPress Legal Pages plugin are:

• Pre-written Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of your basic legal pages in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
• Fully Customizable Pages – Includes customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms of Use, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages like any WP page.
• Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when published.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like every other page on your website.
• Forced Options – Force page or post lock down. When users agree to your terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• New Features – More features get added to this plugin with every new version.

After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu feature will display inside your main dashboard menu …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Menu)

This allows you to create, edit and view your legal pages from your admin area …

(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)

You can create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, affiliate sites, Amazon sites, etc …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Page Type)

Choose from several pre-written legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages – 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 powerful plugin, visit the plugin website:

• WordPress Legal Pages Plugin

Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users with over twenty customizable legal templates for your online presence …

For more details, visit the plugin site here:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Legal Suite Pro Plugin

(Legal Suite Pro)

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 Service
• Earnings Disclaimer

(Legal Suite Pro – 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 plugin licensing is very flexible, allowing you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

For more information, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If using the services of lawyers to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your website until you can afford professional assistance.

We want your site to be protected!

Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (for FREE!), or consider choosing one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using legal documentation, or plugins - see section below.

(Legal Pages Generator)

Legal Pages Generator Software quickly generates basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As stated earlier, if you do any type of business online (or are planning to), it’s important that your website is compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate business online and the terms of service and guidelines of 3rd-party products and services that you may decide to promote or sell online. Your website or blog must comply with a wide range of laws and regulatory guidelines, many 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 are not offering legal advice. We strongly advise you to do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.

Additional Legal Information

Here is a time-saving list of additional sites we suggest you visit to better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet legal requirements and guidelines:

• 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

See Also …

• 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
• 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 compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress website or blog.

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