Is your WordPress website legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking any laws, or contravening the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you are selling or endorsing?
As the digital way of life continues to grow at an extraordinary rate and the rules keep changing, it’s vitally important that you stay on top of what’s going on and make sure that your website remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your web presence plays an important role 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 profit, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection agencies, such as the Better Business Bureau, also called the BBB. Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.
(Better Business Bureau – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The new laws affect various business categories, including:
- Any kind of advertising, including Google AdSense
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Blogging
- etc.
If your website does not display certain legal pages to visitors (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, earning disclaimers, etc.), many sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank will not let you list your digital products on their network, PayPal could suspend your account, Facebook could reject web applications, and you will not be allowed into a range of advertising or online marketing networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
This guide explains why it’s important to have a compliant website and how to quickly add legal pages to your WordPress site using simple methods and resources.
Is Your Site Breaking The Law?
Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice. As previously stated, the aim of this article is only to make you aware that your website may be subject to certain legal requirements in accordance with federal, regional or local laws and regulations that govern your business and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you endorse on your website
Why It’s Important To Make Your Website Compliant
Consider what would happen to your business if any of these situations were to occur:
- Someone suffers a cardiac arrest after using your online fitness program.
- The skin cream you promote as an affiliate 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 plan to do with their personal details.
- Someone copies content from your website and puts it up on their website.
- There is no statement on your site letting visitors know that you are endorsing a product as an affiliate that you could earn financial benefits if visitors purchase it.
- You did not spell out the terms of your refund or return policies.
- Visitors claim your testimonials are misleading and decide to sue you.
- You did not disclose in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
- Your site contains adult content and you have not taken sufficient measures to restrict access by underage children.
Consider also these real examples of costly compliance breaches:
- A CPA Marketer failed to provide adequate disclaimers telling visitors they would be required to give up personal information to complete a debt reduction offer. 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 children’s private information.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape UIDs. Many internet marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of $$$ in lost revenue.
- An independent study by Brad Geddes of SearchEngineLand, showed that, of a couple of hundred websites chosen at random, more than 90% had broken at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in breach of at least 2 of Google’s policies, and more than 40% were in breach 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 notices 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 become exposed to the risks of litigation?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- CPA (Cost Per Action) or CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
- MLM Networker
- Affiliate Product Promoter
- AdWords Advertiser
- Info Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
You need to do whatever is necessary to make sure that your website complies with all laws governing the use of your site, wherever you are located.
Compliance With Third-Party Companies
Compliance with third-party companies terms and policies is important.
You must let your visitors know that your business complies with laws and professional guidelines. This not only improves consumer trust and buyer confidence in your business, it’s also required by most companies you do business with online.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires your site to display legal information if using many of their products or service. This includes using Google Analytics …
(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)
Monetizing your websites with Google AdSense …
(Google AdSense policy requirements)
Or promoting your products or services through Google AdWords …
(Google AdWords – Policy Requirements)
If you plan to sell products online using places like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant sites, you are required to add a number of legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale …
(Policy requirements for selling digital products via ClickBank)
The Federal Trade Commission also requires you to display clear disclaimers and policy statements on your site, especially concerning the use of testimonials or product endorsements …
(FTC – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant
New FTC regulations governing how business is conducted 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 results in 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 does not operate in the U.S. it’s best to protect your business interests by making sure that your website is compliant with all FTC regulations and guidelines.
You can find many business resources that can provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help you meet FTC requirements. We provide additional references and links to useful resources to a number of these at the end of this article …
(Structure your disclaimers and disclosures correctly to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Apps - Don’t Forget These
If you plan to develop social networking applications for your website users, social networking sites like Twitter, Facebook, and many others will require you to provide information about your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are not sure whether you may be breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of websites like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
- If you are considering promoting anything online via affiliate marketing, or generate revenue with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon advertising, or use Google AdWords to drive visitors to your pages, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to include on your site to comply with their Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
- If you have ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, then it’s best to act now and take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party websites require you to comply with their terms of use)
Basic Legal Pages You Should Include In Your Website
If your web site is falling short in aspects of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following legal pages to your website will help your business keep out of trouble with most consumer protection authorities and 3rd-party providers, and even help to avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms And Conditions
- Website Disclaimer
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above pages, you may want to look into including any of these pages if applicable:
- Affiliate Disclosure (if you sell or promote affiliate products and services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Compensation Disclosure
- External Links Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (if your website or blog provides general financial content)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Video/Audio Terms Of Use (if you provide users with access to videos or audio files on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
It’s important to add correct disclosure information to your website. For example:
- No Material Connection – Disclosure that informs your readers that you will not receive compensation for writing the article.
- Affiliate Links – Lets your visitors know that you may benefit financially if they buy through your affiliate links.
- Review/Sample Copy – Lets your visitors know that you have received a sample or review copy of the product.
- Sponsored Post – Discloses to visitors that you have been compensated in some form to write the post.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs your 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 online publishers to show prominently on their sites since January 1, 2014.
Adding Legal Pages Content To Your Site
Ideally, you should have a lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once this has been done, there are several ways to include them in your website.
Upload Legal Pages 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 site, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend adding a legal directory to your server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder via FTP …
(Create a ‘legals’ folder in your web server and upload pages via FTP)
You can then add links to your legal pages from your WordPress site using custom links in your menu feature …
(WordPress Menu)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are fully up-to-date and display clearly to visitors. You can add these to your sidebar (or the footer section of your site) so that visitors have access to the information from all of your pages …
(Display links to legal pages on all of your site’s pages)
We have written a detailed tutorial on adding links to pages on your WP sidebar and footer using widgets here:
Using Store-Bought Templates
You can easily find downloadable attorney-drafted forms and agreements by searching online, or by going to websites like the ones shown below:
Find Legal Forms
(Find Legal Forms)
Go here for more information:
Another option is to purchase a set of cut and paste website legal templates designed by attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Cut & Paste Website Legal Pages – Legal Templates)
Cut & Paste website templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a quick search and replace to add your own business details, then pasted into your legal web 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
- FTC Compliance
- Privacy Policy: Google, DoubleClick DART, etc.
- Terms of Service & Conditions of Use.
You can either create a new page on your website for every legal form you want to add to your site, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload these to your web server as described previously.
More info:
WordPress Plugins – Legal Pages
In addition to using legal templates, another option for adding legal pages to your site is to use WordPress plugins.
Here are some legal plugins for WordPress websites and blogs that you should check out:
WP Legal Pages Plugin
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin)
If you don’t want to spend time creating legal pages manually, then consider choosing a plugin like WP Legal Pages instead …
This plugin is not free, but it’s an affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your site and save you time.
Some of the benefits of using WP Legal Pages are:
- Pre-written Templates – The plugin gives you access to over 20 built-in legal templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
- Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the legal pages you need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
- Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes fully customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
- Editable Pages – WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages just like any WordPress page.
- Custom Shortcodes – Add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your pages when you publish.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like every other page on your site.
- Forced Options – Force page lock down. When a user agrees to the terms, the page unlocks.
- Additional Features – More features are being added to this plugin with every new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your main dashboard area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Legal Pages Menu)
This lets you create, view and edit your legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages – Settings Screen)
With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites with products, review sites, Amazon sites, etc …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Page Type)
Choose from a number of built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin – 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
Go here to learn more about this handy plugin:
Compliance Bar – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Compliance Bar is a simple WordPress plugin containing over twenty customizable compliance pages for your website …
Go here to learn more about the plugin:
Legal Suite Pro
(Legal Suite Pro For WordPress)
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 Use
- 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 have packaged high quality, professionally written legal disclaimers into a plugin that can be installed quickly on any WordPress powered site. Your legal pages can be installed and set up on your site in one minute or less and the license allows you to install and use this plugin on all of your websites.
More information:
If using the services of lawyers to create your legal pages is out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your site until you can afford to hire a lawyer.
We want your site to be safe!
Download the Legal Pages Generator software below (it’s FREE!), or consider using one of the better solutions we discuss in this article, such as using attorney-drafted legal templates, or plugins as described in the section below.
(Legal Pages Generator Software)
Legal Pages Generator allows you to easily generate essential legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you engage in any form of business online (or are planning to), you need to ensure that your website is found to comply with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices and the guidelines and terms of service (TOS) provided by 3rd-party products and services that you may be promoting or offering online. If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect the rights of 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 provide no 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 fully complies with all legal requirements concerning your specific business.
Resources
Here is a time-saving list of additional sites we recommend you visit to better understand what may be required of your site to stay 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
- BBB – 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
- United States 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
- 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 and easily add essential legal pages to your WordPress site using simple resources and WordPress plugins.
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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)