Is your WordPress site legally compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking any laws, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose products or services you sell or promote?
Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes goods or services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about legal requirements won’t protect someone from taking legal action against your business.
New laws introduced in 2014 to regulate how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you promote anything on your site for commercial gain, you will need to follow certain disclosure guidelines to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory agencies, such as the (US based) Better Business Bureau, also referred to as the BBB. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet to learn more.
(Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
These laws affect several business categories, 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 legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not allow you to list your digital products on their network, PayPal may suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your web applications, and you will not be allowed to promote a number of advertising or online marketing networks.
If your website is not compliant, you could face a whole range of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
The purpose of this article is to help make you aware that your website(s) may be subject to legal requirements, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of external providers whose services or products you may be advertising online, and that there are plugin-based solutions for WordPress website owners that can help your website become fully compliant, such as the plugins listed further below.
Is Your Website Breaking The Law?
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we do not offer legal advice. You must carry out your own due diligence and we recommend consulting a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with the law wherever your business is based.
The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant
Consider for a minute what could happen to your business if the following were to occur:
- Someone has a cardiac arrest after they use your online fitness workout.
- The skin cream you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone an allergic reaction.
- You’ve told subscribers that you won’t sell their information, but you haven’t described exactly what you will do with it.
- Someone steals content from your site and puts it up on their website.
- There is no statement on your website or blog making your site visitors aware that you are an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing and could earn a commission if visitors purchase it.
- You have not spelled out the conditions of your refund/return policies.
- Visitors claim your testimonials are all fake and decide to sue you.
- You haven’t disclosed in a product review that you were given a free copy of the product.
- Your website includes adult information and you have not taken appropriate measures to keep underage children from accessing it.
Consider too these real case studies of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling online users they would have to give up personal information to complete his offer. Cost = $390,000.
- A social networking app developer copped a whopping $800,000 fine for collecting personal information without users’ knowledge and consent – including storing children’s private details.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, resulting thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independently-conducted study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred randomly-picked websites, more than 90% were in breach of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in violation of at least two of Google’s policies, and more than 40% had broken 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 notices 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 becoming targeted for litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Marketer
- AdWords Advertiser
- Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- EBay Seller
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
- Seller Of Any Service Or Product Online
It’s imperative to ensure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and information displayed to your site users.
Compliance With 3rd-Party Companies
Compliance with 3rd-party services terms and policies is important.
You must let your site visitors know that your business complies with all necessary legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only improves trust and confidence in your business, it’s also required by most companies you engage with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires you to display certain information if using their services and product features. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Earning revenue with your WordPress sites with Google AdSense advertising …
(Google AdSense display advertising policy requirements)
And even promoting your business using Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you plan to sell digital products using companies such as ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will need to add a number of legal pages to your website before your products are approved for sale …
(Policy requirements for using ClickBank)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires you to include clear disclaimers and policy statements to visitors, especially if you plan to sell products and services using testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations Require Your Site To Comply
New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted online were introduced in March 2012. Search online and you will see that many websites are unaware (or choose to ignore) these requirements. As documented on their website, this typically prompts the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute site owners in an effort to get other businesses to comply.
If you do any type 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 website is compliant with all FTC regulations.
You can find many sites that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. We provide additional references 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 Also Have Compliance Requirements
If you plan to develop social networking applications for your site users, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others will require you to provide access to your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are not sure whether or not you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything on your site as an affiliate marketer, or monetizing your pages with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, 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 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’ve been wondering if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to avoid becoming a magnet for litigation.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their terms of use and policies)
Common Legal Pages You Should Add To Your Site
If you suspect that your website or blog is falling short in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following legal pages to your website will help your website stay out of trouble with many consumer protection agencies and external service providers, and avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Us
- Privacy Policy
- Terms Of Use
- Disclaimers
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
As well as the above, you may want to look into including any of these pages where applicable:
- Affiliate Agreement (if you sell products or services through an affiliate program)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general money-making advice)
- Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
- Use Of Media (e.g. if you allow media downloads on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
It’s important to add the right types of disclosure pages to your site. For example:
- No Material Connection – Disclosure that informs site users that you will not receive any type of compensation for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Informs your readers that you will receive compensation if they buy through your affiliate links.
- Review Or Sample Copy – Informs visitors that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product or service by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Disclosure that informs your readers that you have been compensated in some form to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs users 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 Content To Your WordPress Site
Ideally, you should consult a lawyer or a legal firm and ask them to prepare the content of your legal documents. Once you have this done, there are several ways to add them to your website.
Uploading Legal Web Pages Manually
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 legal directory in your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder via FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder on your server and upload pages using FTP)
You can then add a link to your legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu administration …
(Custom WordPress Menu)
Displaying Legal Pages On Your Site
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to your visitors. You can insert these into your sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your website) to ensure that visitors have access to the information from all your pages …
(Display legal information to users on all of your website’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your WordPress sidebar or footer using widgets here:
Legal Templates
You can find attorney-drafted downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or going to sites like this one:
Find Legal Forms
More information:
Another option is to download a set of website legal templates created by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Forms)
These templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a quick 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 Website Legal Forms include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance
- Privacy Policy
- Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.
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 described earlier.
To learn more, go here:
Plugins – Legal Pages
As well as using cut & paste templates, you can simplify things using WordPress plugins.
Here are some great legal plugins for WordPress users you should check out:
WP Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)
If manually setting up legal pages for your site feels too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing a plugin like WP Legal Pages …
The WP Legal Pages plugin is not free, but it’s a reasonably affordable and well-supported premium WordPress plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you many headaches.
Here are just some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages:
- Built-in Legal Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – Set up most of the legal pages you need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and easy to edit legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Editable Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit legal pages just like any WP page.
- Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your pages when published.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other page on your website.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When the user agrees to your legal terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
- New Features – New plugin features get added when new versions are released.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will display inside your main WP dashboard area …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This allows you to view, create and edit your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Settings Area)
The plugin gives you the option to create legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites, affiliate/review websites, AdSense sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Page type drop down menu)
Choose from various pre-configured legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured 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
For more details about this plugin, visit this site:
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar is a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your web presence …
More info:
Legal Suite Pro
(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 And 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers 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 less than one minute and the license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your sites.
Visit this website for more information:
If using the services of lawyers to create your online legal documentation is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some form of basic legal protection on your website until you can afford legal services.
We want your business to be legally protected!
Download the FREE Legal Pages Generator software below, or choose one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using ready-made legal content, or a legal pages plugin - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to easily generate necessary 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 ensure that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate how business online is done and any terms of service (TOS) and guidelines provided by 3rd-party products and services that you may decide to promote or sell online. Your website or blog must comply with a whole range of regulations, 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, we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on this website. You must do your own due diligence and consult legal experts about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements pertaining to your business.
References And Resources
Here is a time-saving list of sites we recommend you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to comply and meet its legal requirements and guidelines:
- Federal Trade Commission Latest List Of Rules & Regulations
- FTC Advertising & Marketing Rules Of the Road
- FTC Advertising And Marketing On The Internet
- 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
- United States Patent and Trademark Office
- US Copyright Office
In Addition …
- 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 compliant website. Use the information presented above to quickly add all necessary legal pages to your website.
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"This is AMAZING! I had learnt about how to use WordPress previously, but this covers absolutely everything and more!! Incredible value! Thank you!" - Monique, Warrior Forum