Is your website legally compliant? Do you know if your site is breaking any rules or regulations, or breaching the Terms of Service (TOS) of any 3rd-party companies whose products or services you are offering or endorsing?
Online laws, regulations, and guidelines were designed to protect the rights of consumers and apply to anyone who markets, sells or promotes products or services online. Every website owner risks being sued for not following compliance laws. Feigning ignorance about the law won’t prevent someone from taking legal action against you.
New laws introduced in 2014 regulating how businesses promote advertising on their websites state that if you plan to promote anything on your site for commercial gain, then you must follow certain principles of disclosure to prevent enforceable orders being issued against you by regulatory departments, such as the BBB, or Better Business Bureau. 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 – Online Interest-Based Advertising Accountability Program)
The introduction of these laws has implications for various business categories, including:
- Any kind of advertising, e.g. PPC advertising
- Retarget Marketing
- Google Analytics (or other analytics software)
- Affiliate Marketers
- Product Creation
- Bloggers
- etc.
If your site does not display certain pages to visitors (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, online merchants like ClickBank or JVZoo will not allow you to sell digital products, PayPal could suspend your account and freeze your funds, Facebook could suspend your web applications, and you will not be allowed to promote various advertising or online merchant networks.
You could also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to litigation.
This guide explains the importance of having a legally compliant website and how to quickly and easily add all necessary legal pages to your site using simple and cost-effective methods, resources and plugins.
Is Your Website Breaking The Law?
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we are not providing legal advice. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website is compliant with all laws and regulations wherever you do business.
Why Ensuring That Your Website Is Compliant Is Important
Consider what would happen to your business in the following scenarios:
- A person suffers a heart attack after using your online fitness workout.
- The skin care products you promote as an affiliate marketer gives someone who purchases from your link allergic reactions.
- You’ve let your subscribers know that you will not sell their information, but you have not informed them exactly what you’ll do with the information you’ve collected.
- Someone copies content from your site and puts it up on their own website.
- There is no statement on your website letting your site visitors know that you’re an affiliate for the product you’re endorsing and could get paid a financial benefit if visitors purchase through your affiliate link.
- You did not spell out the conditions of your refund/return policies.
- Your visitors claim that your testimonials are false and decide to sue you.
- You didn’t disclose that you received a free copy in your product review.
- Your website contains adult information and you didn’t take sufficient measures to restrict access by underaged persons.
Consider now 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 his offer. In addition to a significant $390,000 fine, he is now required to provide everyone he does business with for the next 20 years, a copy of the judgement — including employees.
- A social networking app developer copped a massive $800,000 fine for collecting personal information from mobile device address books without the owners’ knowledge and consent – including storing private details about children.
- Facebook’s Terms Of Service does not allow users to scrape Users IDs. Many marketers gambled that they could get away with it 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 randomly-picked websites, more than 90% were in violation of at least one of Google’s policies, more than 65% were in breach of at least two 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 whose policies they had infringed, 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 risk of litigation through non-compliance?
Regardless of whether you are a:
- PPA (Pay Per Action) Marketer
- Multilevel Marketer
- Affiliate Product Marketer
- AdWords Advertiser
- Info Product Marketer
- Amazon Affiliate
- e-Commerce Store Owner
- Publisher Of Adult Content
- Provider Of Freelance, Coaching Or Consulting Services
- Seller Of Any Product Or Service Online
it’s important to ensure that your digital presence has the right legal pages and information displayed to all you site visitors.
Complying With Third-Party Companies
Compliance with third-party companies terms and policies is important.
You are expected to let your site visitors know that your business complies with all necessary laws and recommended guidelines. This not only increases consumer trust and confidence in your site, it’s also required by most companies you interact with.
Let’s take a look at some examples:
Google requires websites to display certain information if using their services. This includes Google Analytics …
(Policy requirements for using Google Analytics)
Monetizing your blog with Google AdSense online advertising …
(Google AdSense online advertising - policy requirements)
Or promoting your products through Google AdWords …
(Policy requirements for using Google AdWords)
If you sell digital products using companies like ClickBank, JVZoo, or other established merchant networks, you will need to add a number of legal pages to your site before they will approve your products for sale in their networks …
(ClickBank – policy requirements for product sellers)
The FTC (Federal Trade Commission) also requires that you include clear disclaimers and policies on your website, especially if you plan to sell or promote products and services using product testimonials or endorsements …
(Federal Trade Commission – consumer policies and regulations)
FTC Regulations – Ensure That Your Site Is Compliant
FTC regulations governing the conduct of doing business online were introduced in March 2012. A quick search online reveals that many business are still 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 website owners 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 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.
There are many business resources that can provide guidelines and examples for structuring disclaimers and disclosures to help your site meet FTC requirements. We provide links to and additional references to some of these at the end of this article …
(Structuring your disclaimers and disclosures correctly is important to avoid running foul of the law)
Social Media Apps Also Require Compliance
If you plan to develop social networking applications that will integrate with your site, you will also be required to provide social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, and others with access to your legal pages …
(Facebook developer app – policy requirements)
- If you are unsure as to whether or not you may be 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 services or products online via affiliate marketing, or monetize your pages with Google AdSense, Amazon, or eBay ads, or using 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 - don’t risk having your accounts terminated.
- If you’ve ever wondered if “borrowing” a Copyright Notice is Copyright infringement, take proper precautions to protect yourself and your website.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all 3rd-party websites require you to comply with their policies and guidelines)
What Legal Pages Do I Need To Add To My Website To Be Insured Against Legal Compliance Issues?
If you suspect that your website is lacking in areas of compliance, then this section will help you.
Adding the following compliance pages to your website should help your site keep out of trouble with most regulatory agencies and third-party service providers, and even help you avoid potential legal issues or even threats of legal action (e.g. “takedown” notices):
- About Us Page
- Contact Page
- Privacy Policy
- Terms And Conditions
- Disclaimer Pages
- General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) Compliance
In addition to the above pages, you may want to consider implementing any of these pages:
- Affiliate Disclosure (e.g. if you promote or sell affiliate products or services)
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Linking Policy
- Financial Disclaimers (e.g. if your website or blog provides general financial information)
- Refund Policy (if you sell products or services online)
- Media Terms (if you allow media downloads on your site)
Disclosure Pages – Types
Adding the right disclosure information to your website is important. For example:
- No Material Connection – Informs readers that you are not being paid for writing the content.
- Affiliate Links – Lets users know that you will benefit financially if they act on your recommendation and buy through your affiliate links.
- Review Or Sample Copy – Explains to site users that you have been given a sample or review copy of the product by the author or product developer.
- Sponsored Post – Lets your visitors be aware that you have been compensated in some way to write the article.
- Third Party Advertising – Informs readers 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.
Adding Legal Pages To Your Site
Ideally, you will have your 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 To Your Website
If someone prepares the legal verbiage for you as standard web pages (e.g. HTML), you can simply upload these to your server, or have someone upload them for you.
We recommend creating a legals folder on your web server and uploading HTML pages containing your legal documentation to this folder using FTP …
(Upload legal pages to your server via FTP)
You can then add links to your pages in WordPress using custom links in your menu administration …
(WordPress Menu)
After uploading your legal pages, make sure that these are kept up-to-date and clearly accessible to visitors. You can add these to the WordPress sidebar (or the footer section of your website) so that users will be able to access the information from all pages …
(It’s important to display legal pages to users on all of your website’s pages)
We have created a detailed tutorial about displaying links to pages on your sidebar here:
Store-Bought Legal Templates
You can easily find attorney-prepared downloadable internet forms and agreements just by searching online, or by visiting websites like the ones listed below:
Find Legal Forms
Go here for more information:
Alternatively, you can download a package of cut & paste legal templates drafted by legal attorney Scott Talbert …
Cut And Paste Website Legal Pages
(Scott Talbert’s Legal Form Templates)
Cut & Paste website templates were written by an attorney and feature less passive voice and more plain language phrasing and can be customized with a simple quick search and replace to insert your own details, then pasted into your pages.
The legal templates included in Scott Talbert’s Website Legal Form Templates include:
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Copyright Notice
- Disclaimer (multi-discipline professional disclaimers)
- DMCA Compliance
- Federal Trade Commission Compliance
- Privacy Policy: Google, DART, etc.
- Terms of Service & 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 every legal form you want added to your website, then paste the content from the templates into your pages and publish or upload the pages to your web server as described earlier.
To learn more, go here:
WordPress Legal Page Plugins
As well as using cut & paste templates, you can keep things really simple by using WordPress plugins.
Here are some great legal plugins for WordPress users worth looking into:
WordPress Legal Pages
(WP Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress)
If manually creating legal pages for your website feels too time-consuming for you, then consider choosing WordPress Legal Pages instead …
This plugin is not free, but it’s a very affordable and well-supported premium plugin that will help simplify the job of creating and implementing legal pages on your website and save you time.
Here are just some of the reasons to consider using WP Legal Pages plugin:
- Built-in Legal 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 basic legal pages you will need in around 3 minutes with a few mouse clicks.
- Fully Customizable Pages – Includes fully customizable and completely editable legal form templates (e.g. ToS, Disclaimer, Earnings Disclaimer, Privacy Policy and more!)
- Easy To Edit Pages – WordPress content editor lets you edit legal pages just like any page on your website.
- Shortcodes – You can add shortcodes to any of your WordPress pages and the information is then automatically inserted into your content when you publish.
- Exclude pages. The plugin lets you exclude pages from menus with a simple check box and delete and manage these like any WordPress page.
- Forced Options – Force page lockdown. Page unlocks and can be accessed when users agree to your terms.
- Additional Features – More features get added to this plugin with each new version.
After installing WordPress Legal Pages, a new menu feature will appear in your main WordPress dashboard area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Menu)
This lets you view, create and edit legal pages from your admin area …
(WP Legal Pages Plugin – Settings Area)
With WPLegal Pages, you can create legal pages for different types of sites, such as business websites, niche sites, e-commerce sites, etc …
(WordPress Legal Pages – Page Type)
Select from various built-in legal templates …
(WordPress Legal Pages Plugin For WordPress – Pre-configured 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 about using this powerful plugin, visit this website:
Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Compliance Bar is a simple plugin for WordPress users with over 20 customizable compliance templates for your digital presence …
More info:
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 & 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 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 license allows you to install and use the plugin on all of your websites.
Go here for more info:
If hiring legal experts to create your legal pages is currently out of your budget, consider implementing at least some basic form of legal protection on your site until you can afford professional assistance.
We want your site to be legally protected!
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 legal forms, or a WordPress legal pages plugin - see section below.
(Legal Pages Generator)
Legal Pages Generator Software allows you to easily generate basic legal documents for your website including Terms of Service, Privacy Statement, Copyright Notice, Website Disclaimer and Earnings Disclaimer.
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As we’ve previously pointed out, if you do any kind of business online (or plan to), you need to ensure that your website remains compliant with legal requirements of government agencies that regulate online business practices and the terms of service and guidelines required by third-party services and products that you may decide to promote or recommend online. If your website doesn’t comply 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, please note that we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice on this website. 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 concerning your specific business.
Additional Legal Information
Here is a time-saving list of websites we recommend you visit to better understand what your business requires to remain compliant and meet legal obligations:
- FTC 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
- 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
Additionally …
- 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
Hopefully, this article has helped you understand why it’s important to have a legally compliant website. Use the information above to quickly and easily add essential legal pages to your website.
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