One of the worst predicaments you can find yourself in as a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of having broken the law.
If your website isn’t compliant with laws intended to protect the rights of consumers, you’re breaking the law.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering serious financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this post, we look at a simple and easy-to-use solution for WordPress users that can help make your site fully compliant in minutes.
Is Your Website Legally Compliant?
As the cybersphere continues growing at breakneck speed and the rules keep changing, it’s vital to stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website or blog remains legal, especially if your digital presence is an integral part of your business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your web site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, legal disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites such as Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal could close down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook and other social networks will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed into many leading advertising and affiliate merchant networks.
If your digital presence is not compliant, you could also face a number of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your web properties comply with legal requirements and regulatory guidelines, visitors may lose trust and confidence in your business.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Disclaimer: Please note that we are not lawyers and we cannot offer legal advice on our website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website could be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with compulsory laws and regulations that govern your business (some of which you may not even be aware of),
- The importance of complying with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or using on your website, and
- There are easy-to-install solutions that can help your business become more compliant, such as the tool that we review in this article.
If your website or blog falls short in terms of compliance, below we review a simple plugin for WordPress users you should know more about.
Announcing …
Compliance Bar – Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-install and simple-to-use plugin for WordPress users containing over 20 customizable compliance templates for your website …
More info: Compliance Bar Plugin
Plugin Benefits
Here are just some of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to make your website or blog instantly compliant:
Fast And Easy To Install And Implement. Ready To Use In Very Little Time.
Compliance Bar is really easy to install. Just upload it to your Plugins folder via your WP admin area and activate.
Editable Templates
Easily edit the built-in legal templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress visual content editor.
Dedicated Support
Compliance Bar plugin provides dedicated plugin support to help you with anything you need.
Additional benefits of the plugin include the following:
- Customized Legal Templates: The Compliance Bar plugin will create your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Library: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use - a complete library of training videos is provided.
- Use In Every Country: As long as you consult a qualified legal representative to make sure that the legal page templates provided with the plugin are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin wherever you are located.
- Use On All WordPress Sites: As long as your site is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Just select the legal pages you want to add to your site and leave out all other irrelevant pages.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features
Compliance Bar offers many features to website owners. Below we have listed just some of those features:
- Quick and easy to install and configure. Ready to start using in no time.
- Display Visually Appealing Icon Bar – Display links to your compliance pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Show Sensitive Information – If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult content, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you do business in Europe or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. Compliance Bar displays an attractive bar notifying visitors and covering your site from non-compliance issues.
- Record & Store IP Acceptance – The plugin can record the IP address of your visitors for future reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they haven’t.
- Shortcodes – Compliance Bar is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the popups).
- Compatible With All Mobile Devices – Compliance Bar has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices or tablets and displays mobile optimized icons automatically based on visitor mobile browsers.
Using Compliance Bar
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” section gets added to your WordPress admin area.
Let’s briefly review these sections …
User Profile
There are a number of default fields in this area where you can input your business information into entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Desk URL,” “Contact Phone,” “Refund Duration (Days),” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Business Address,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Page – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
The Compliance Bar Plugin uses dynamic shortcodes to dynamically insert the information from your User Profile inside your legal page templates …
(Compliance Bar User Profile Page: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required data has been entered into the plugin settings fields, users can then access the other sections of the plugin.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” screen includes a list of all of the plugin’s pages …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Below is the full list of legal templates made available by the plugin when we last checked the website:
- About Us
- AdSense Disclaimer
- Affiliate Agreements
- Affiliate Disclosure
- Amazon Affiliate Disclaimer
- Anti-Spam Policy
- Contact Us
- Copyright/DCMA Notice
- Disclaimer
- Double Dart Cookies
- Earnings Disclaimer
- External Links Policy
- FTC Statement
- Legal Disclaimer
- Linking Policy
- Medical Disclaimer
- Privacy Policy
- Returns/Refund Policy
- Support
- Terms
- Terms & Conditions
- Testimonial Disclosure
- Adult Content Disclosure
You can create legal pages for your site quickly and easily simply by selecting checkboxes and clicking ”Save” in the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)
Your legal pages will then be created and added to the “Pages” section of your site.
Compliance Bar Icons
The plugin is installed with a default set of icons for referencing your legal pages …
Icons are customizable. You can purchase additional icons from the plugin developer, or create/upload your own to match the style of your site’s design …
(Compliance Bar: Legal Page Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Compliance Templates
You can easily modify and delete the legal templates from the “Compliance Pages” area, just as you would any typical WordPress page …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Edit Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes
- Editing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin will notify you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. legal pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
The plugin settings area provides various options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, whether to show links or icon images, background colors and images, image size, selecting which pages to include an icon for in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your home page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, and more …
(Compliance Bar Section: Create Bar – Image source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create several Compliance Bars to display different disclaimers on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your site.
- The plugin allows you to display the Compliance Bar on the home page of your site, even if you are using a specific premium theme framework (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile screens, there is a limit to the number of page icons you can display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it displays links to your legal using a visually attractive icon bar on your site …
You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance icons to show …
PopUps
If you plan to publish content that needs to be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, adult-related, etc.), Compliance Bar can display pop-ups that require users to accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” page gives you full control over the settings and customization of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover different uses throughout your site …
You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want a Pop Up to display immediately, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from appearing again within a specific time period, and store the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Screen: IP Log Details – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If you are based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you need to be aware of EU compliance requirements …
The Compliance Bar plugin lets you customize the settings for compliance with EU Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” area …
(EU Cookies Section: Manage Settings – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Compliance Bar has a non-intrusive way of notifying your visitors and covering you from non-compliance.
Page Templates
The “Page Templates” screen, lists all of your compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” menu, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin updates …
User Testimonials
Below are a few of the testimonials customers have published about Compliance Bar:
”One of the most annoying parts about building out a site is to make sure it complies with the law. I always leave this part to the end because its painfully dry and boring and frankly I always just wished their was an easier way. Then I came across Compliance Bar and its literally the most versitile and brilliant plugin I have ever used. All my pages meet FTC requirements now and all I had to do was press a button! Anton and Jon..you guys friggen rock — 1000% highly recommend this!!” Anthony La Rocca – Founder (Hustle Marketing)
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“Don’t Risk Your Online Business” Mike Thomas (The Mike From Maine Show)
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Below are a few additional ways you can use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out your website’s terms of use.
- Displaying compliance icons only on specific pages of your website.
- Reducing refund disputes by clearly spelling out your refund terms before customers purchase.
- If you have content that is deemed inappropriate for persons below a certain age on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to access your content.
Compliance Bar Plugin Product Support
Plugin Developers provide users with dedicated 24/7 plugin support to assist users with anything they need. Plugin users also have access to an entire set of training videos.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, thirty day, 200% money-back guarantee. If your version of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 hours (Monday to Friday), the plugin developers will refund double the purchase price.
Software Price
- Single Edition – Can be installed on a single domain that you own. Price = $37 (Normally $127)
- Business License Edition – Install the plugin on up to 25 sites that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional Licensing – Install the plugin on multiple as many of your own domains as you like. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Please Note: Current pricing for the Compliance Bar plugin depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. The above reflects the price at the time this content was written. This may or may not be the actual price set by the product author when you visit the plugin website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after you’ve purchased.
Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Plugin For Website Compliance
Additional Info
Templates Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assure users on their website that all legal page templates have already been reviewed and approved by lawyers. Nonetheless, we highly recommend that you get legal advice from a qualified legal expert in your area to ensure that your site is fully compliant.
For a demo video of the plugin in action, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.
Get This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered websites. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For complete details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress
Disclaimer: Once again, we are not lawyers and we offer no legal advice here. Do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way of ensuring that your website fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.
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