How To Add Legal Pages To Your WordPress Site

Is your website legally compliant? Do you know if you are breaking the law, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any companies whose services or products you advertise or recommend?

As the digital era continues to grow at such a rapid pace and the rules keep changing, it’s vital that you try to stay informed about what’s happening and make sure that your website or blog remains legally compliant, especially if your web presence plays an important role in your overall business strategy.

New laws introduced in 2014 that regulate how businesses promote advertising on their sites clearly state that if you promote anything on your site for material gain, you need to follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by consumer protection departments, such as the Better Business Bureau (BBB). Search online “The Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program,” which regulates behavioral advertising across the internet for more details.

(Better Business Bureau)

The introduction of these laws has consequences for several business activities, including:

• Any type of advertising, e.g. display advertising
• Retarget Marketing
• Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Product Creators
• Blogging
• etc.

If you do not include certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank won’t allow you to list your digital products for sale, PayPal could suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook will disapprove your web applications, and you will not be allowed to participate in a number of advertising or online merchant networks.

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

The purpose of this guide is to make you aware that your website(s) may be required to comply with certain legalities according to laws that govern your business, the importance of maintaining compliance with the terms of service of other providers whose products or services you may be recommending online, and that there are solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the tools that we list further below.

Is Your Website Or Blog Compliant?

Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we cannot provide legal advice. As previously stated, this article is designed only to help make you aware that your website may be subject to a number of legal policies in accordance with the laws governing your business and that compliance may be required with the terms of service of providers whose products or services you endorse

The Importance Of Making Your Website Compliant

Is your business at risk? Consider for one minute what could happen to your business if the following situations were to take place:

• Someone has a cardiac arrest after purchasing your online workout program.
• The skin care creams you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone skin rashes.
• Your opt-in list provides a statement informing subscribers that you will not sell their information, but you have not described exactly what you plan to do with the details you have collected.
• Someone steals content from your site and puts it up on their website.
• There is no statement on your site letting your visitors know that you are an affiliate for the product you are marketing and may derive financial benefits if they buy it.
• You don’t spell out the terms and conditions of your return policies.
• Someone claims the testimonials on your site are all fake and tries to sue you.
• You have not disclosed in a product review that you received a free copy of the product.
• Your site contains adult information and you have not taken sufficient measures to restrict access by underage persons.

Consider now these documented case studies 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 an offer they were promoting. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, they’ve also been ordered to issue everyone he does business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
• 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 does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers took a risk and lost. Their accounts were shut down, costing them thousands of dollars in lost revenue.
• An independent 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 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 cautions or lose access entirely to the Google program whose policies with the infringement, which could result in loss of income (e.g. AdSense or AdWords).

Can you see how easy it is to become exposed to the risks of litigation?

Regardless of whether you are a:

• CPC (Cost Per Conversion) Marketer
• Network Marketer
• Affiliate Product Marketer
• AdWords Advertiser
• Info Product Publisher
• Amazon Affiliate
• EBay Seller
• Adult Content Publisher
• Freelancer, Consultant Or Coach
• Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online

You need to ensure that your website has the right legal pages and information accessible to all site users.

Complying With Third-Party Services Terms And Policies

Complying with 3rd-party companies terms and policies is important.

You are obligated to let your visitors know that your website complies will all legal requirements and professional guidelines. This not only improves trust and buyer confidence in your website, it’s also a requirement of most companies you engage with online.

Let’s take a look at some examples:

Google requires your site to display legal information if using their products or features. This includes Google Analytics …

(Google Analytics – Policy Requirements)

Making money online with your blogs using Google AdSense …

(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)

Or promoting your products or services via Google AdWords …

(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)

If you sell information products through companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established online merchant networks, you will be required to add certain legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale in their networks …

(Policy requirements for ClickBank product vendors)

The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policies to visitors, especially if you plan to use product testimonials or endorsements …

(Federal Trade Commission – consumer guidelines and regulations)

New FTC Regulations Require Your Website To Be 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 unaware (or choose to flaunt) these requirements. As is already the case, this will most likely prompt the FTC to make an example of businesses and prosecute 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 ensuring that your website complies with FTC guidelines.

You can find many resources online that can provide guidelines on how to structure disclaimers and disclosures to help your business meet FTC requirements. See the 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)

Don’t Forget Social Media Applications

If you plan to create apps for your website, sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others will require you to provide information about your legal pages …

(Apps for social networking sites like Facebook also require compliance)

• If you are unsure whether you are breaking the law, and/or Terms of Service policies and guidelines of service providers like Google, Facebook, etc., then it’s best to assume that you most probably are.
• If you are considering promoting products or services online as an affiliate marketer, or making money online with Google AdSense, eBay or Amazon ads, or driving visitors to your website using Google AdWords, etc., then find out exactly what kind of legal information you are required to provide on your site to comply with all Terms Of Service and policy requirements to avoid having your accounts shut down.
• If you’ve 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 and policies)

What Compliance Pages Do I Need To Add To My Website To Be Safe From Legal Compliance Issues?

If your web site lacks in areas of compliance, then you will find this section helpful.

At its most basic, adding the following compliance pages to your site will help keep you out of trouble with many regulatory authorities and third-party service providers, and help to avoid possible legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “take down” notices):

• About Us
• Contact Page
• Privacy Statement
• Terms & Conditions
• Website Disclaimers
• General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance

In addition to the above pages, you may want to consider including one or more of these pages where applicable:

• Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you provide information about affiliate products or services)
• Anti-Spam Policy
• Earnings Disclaimer
• External Links Policy
• Health Disclaimers (if your website provides health or medical content)
• Refund Policy (if you run an e-commerce site)
• Use Of Media (e.g. if you allow users to download media on your site)

Types Of Disclosure Pages

Adding the correct type of content disclosure is important. For example:

• No Material Connection – This lets users be aware that you will not receive for writing the article.
• Affiliate Links – Lets site users be aware that you will derive some form of financial or similar form of benefit if they act on your recommendation and buy through an affiliate link.
• Sample/Review Copy – Discloses to your visitors that you have been given a review or sample copy of the product you’re reviewing or writing about.
• Sponsored Post – Disclosure that lets your visitors know that you have been compensated in some way to write the content.
• Third Party Advertising – Informs your 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 Compliance Pages To Your WordPress Website

Ideally, you will have your lawyer prepare the verbiage of your legal documents. Once you have this, there are several ways to add them to your website.

Upload Legal Web Pages Manually

If someone prepares and delivers the legal verbiage for you in HTML format, 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 directory (e.g. via FTP) …

(Upload legal pages to your web server 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)

Make sure that your legal pages are fully up-to-date and display clearly to your visitors. You can insert these into your sidebar (or place them in the footer section of your website or blog) so that visitors have access to the information from all of your pages …

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

If you need help displaying links to pages on your sidebar and footer using widgets, see this step-by-step tutorial:

• Adding WordPress Widgets To Your Sidebar

Templates

You can easily find attorney-drafted disclosures and downloadable forms and agreements by searching online, or by visiting sites like this one:

Find Legal Forms

(FindLegalForms.com)

More info:

• FindLegalForms.com – Attorney-drafted legal forms

Alternatively, you can purchase a package of cut & paste website legal templates written by attorney Scott Talbert …

Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages

(Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Pages)

These templates feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with simple search and replace to add your own details, then pasted into your web pages.

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

• Anti-Spam Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
• DMCA Compliance
• FTC Compliance (This proprietary FTC page reflects Federal Trade Commission regulations and guidelines that came into effect in 2012)
• Privacy Policy: Google & DoubleClick DART, etc.
• ToS & Conditions of Use.

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

Visit this website for more details:

• Website Legal Pages

Legal Pages – WordPress Plugins

As well as using cut & paste templates, you can simplify things by using a plugin.

Here are some great plugins for WordPress-driven websites worth looking into:

WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress

(WP Legal Pages Plugin)

If you don’t want to bother with creating legal pages manually, then consider using a plugin like WP Legal Pages …

WordPress Legal Pages is not a free plugin, but it’s a low-priced and well-supported premium plugin that will help make the work of creating and implementing legal pages on your site a lot easier and save you time.

Some of the benefits of using the WP Legal Pages are:

• Built-in Legal Templates – Includes over 20 built-in legal page templates created by a team of professional lawyers.
• Very Quick And Easy To Use – You can set up most of the basic legal pages you will need in a few minutes with just a few clicks of the mouse.
• Fully Customizable Pages – The plugin includes customizable and editable legal form templates (e.g. Terms Of Service, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Earnings Disclaimer and more!)
• Easy To Edit Pages – Full WYSIWYG editor lets you edit all legal pages like every other page on your website.
• Custom Shortcodes Integration – You can add shortcodes to your website or blog pages and the information will then be automatically inserted into your content when published.
• Exclude pages. Exclude pages from menus with a simple checkbox and delete and manage these like any other WordPress page.
• Forced Options – Force page lockdown. When users agree to the terms, the page unlocks, giving them access.
• New Features – The plugin is updated with new features when new versions are released.

When you install WordPress Legal Pages, a menu item will display inside your dashboard area …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)

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

(WordPress Legal Pages – Settings Screen)

You have the option of easily creating legal pages for different online uses, such as business websites with products, affiliate websites, AdSense sites, etc …

(WordPress Legal Pages – Page Type)

You can also choose from several built-in legal templates …

(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – 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 this handy plugin:

• WP Legal Pages

Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

Compliance Bar Plugin is a total compliance and disclaimer solution for your site …

More info:

• Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance

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 of Service
• 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. 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 (even sites that you decide to sell or flip).

For more details, go here:

• Legal Suite Pro Plugin

If hiring a lawyer to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, then consider implementing at least some type of basic legal protection on your site until you can afford a solicitor.

We want your business to be safe!

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

(Legal Pages Generator Software)

Legal Pages Generator Software lets you easily generate basic legal documents for your website including ToS, Privacy Policy, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and optional Earnings Disclaimer.

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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you make money online, it’s important that your site is found to comply with regulatory agencies and any terms of service and guidelines of 3rd-party services and products that you may be promoting or advertising online. If your website isn’t compliant 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?

Disclaimer: Once again, please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer 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 the law wherever your business is based.

Resources

Here is a useful list of additional sites we suggest you visit to help you better understand what your business requires to stay compliant and meet 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 – 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
• United States Patent and Trademark Office
• US Copyright Office

Also …

• 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 above to quickly add essential legal pages to your WordPress website or blog using simple resources and solutions.

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