One of the worst things that can happen to you as a website owner is to suddenly discover that you have broken the law.
Your website or blog has to comply with a wide range of laws, some of which you may not be aware of.
Being non-compliant puts you at risk of suffering significant financial losses and the loss of your reputation. Why risk your money and your business reputation, when you can protect yourself so inexpensively?
In this article, we look at a simple and cost-effective WordPress solution that can help make your website compliant in minutes.
Is Your Site Legally Compliant?
As the internet continues to grow at breakneck speed and the rules keep changing, it’s important that you stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains compliant with all laws and regulations, especially if your digital presence is an essential aspect of your overall business strategy.
If there are no legal pages on your site (e.g. terms of service, privacy statement, financial disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, digital marketplaces like ClickBank won’t let you list your digital products for sale, PayPal may shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you won’t be allowed into a range of other advertising and affiliate marketing networks.
Plus, you may also be inadvertently leaving yourself open and vulnerable to legal action.
At the very least, if you don’t make it clear to your visitors that your web properties comply with all legal requirements and regulations, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.
(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, most third-party services require you to comply with their policies and guidelines!)
Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on this website.
The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:
- Your website may be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with compulsory federal, state and local laws and regulations that govern your business,
- The importance of complying with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you may be promoting or endorsing on your website, and
- There are solutions that can help your site become compliant, such as the tool that we discuss below.
In this article, we review a simple plugin for WordPress-powered websites and blogs that provides a total compliance & disclaimer solution for your website.
Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …
Compliance Bar Plugin – WordPress Website Compliance Plugin
Plugin Description
Compliance Bar Plugin is an easy-to-install WordPress plugin containing over twenty customizable legal disclaimer templates for your online business …
More info: Compliance Bar
Benefits
Here we have listed just a few of the benefits of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website or blog compliant:
Quick And Simple To Install And Use. Be Up And Running In Minutes.
Compliance Bar Plugin installs like any regular plugin. Simply upload it to your Plugin folder via your administrator account and activate.
Easy-To-Edit Page Templates
Easily make changes to the pre-built legal page templates inside the plugin from the settings menu with the WordPress WYSIWYG editor.
24/7 Support
The plugin develop provides dedicated 24/7 plugin support to assist users if they experience any difficulties.
Some additional benefits include:
- Customized Legal Pages: The Compliance Bar plugin creates your legal pages in seconds and customizes them to your business and website.
- Video Training Manuals: Compliance Bar is not complicated to use - a full library of training videos is available.
- Use In All Countries: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the legal page templates provided in Compliance Bar are suitable and satisfactory for your business, country and website, you can use the plugin anywhere in the world.
- Use For Every Website Purpose: As long as your website runs on WordPress, you can use the plugin for any website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers that pertain to your specific business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and ignore those that are unnecessary.
Features
Compliance Bar offers many features to WP users. Below we have listed just a few of these:
- Quick and simple to install and set up. Ready to start using in minutes.
- Show Attractive Icon Bar – Display links to your legal pages in the form of attractive icons that can be positioned on different locations on your page. You can also upload your own icons.
- Display Restricted Information – If your website has content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. content related to alcohol, tobacco, adult-related, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.
- EU User Cookie Compliance – If you are based 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 that notifies your users and protects your website from non-compliance.
- Record & Store IP Addresses – Compliance Bar can record the IP addresses of your visitors for reference, just in case a visitor accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims otherwise.
- Shortcode Driven – The plugin is integrated with shortcodes that automatically populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your website, (even in the popups).
- Mobile Friendly – The plugin has individual settings for displaying on mobile devices and will display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on the web browser being used.
Compliance Bar Plugin Features – Details
After installing and activating the Compliance Bar plugin, the plugin’s “Settings” section is added to your WordPress dashboard.
Let’s review these briefly …
User Profile
There are a number of default categories in this screen where you can enter your business details into input (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Desk URL,” “Location Details,” “Niche Area,” etc.). Not all categories are compulsory, but some are (e.g. “Business Name,” “Support Email,” etc.)
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Screen – Image source: plugin documentation)
The plugin uses shortcodes to populate the information from your User Profile inside your legal pages …
(Compliance Bar Plugin User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been input into the profile fields, you can then access the other plugin section.
Compliance Pages
The “Compliance Pages” area contains all of your templates …
(Compliance Bar: Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Here’s the full list of legal templates made available by the plugin last time we checked their 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
Creating compliance pages for your site can be easily done. Just select the checkboxes next to the pages you want to create and click ”Save” at the bottom of the “Create Pages” area …
(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Templates – Screenshot 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 attractive icons for referencing your legal pages …
The Compliance Bar 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 Plugin: Legal Page Template Icons – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
Edit / Delete Legal Page Templates
You can easily customize and delete the legal disclaimers from the “Compliance Pages” screen, just like any typical page in WordPress …
(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Tips
- Customizing the legal pages is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
- The plugin will notify you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. compliance pages created before installing the plugin).
Compliance Bar
You have 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, specifying which pages should be included in the Compliance Bar, whether or not to display the Compliance bar on your main page, which pages the Compliance Bar will display in, mobile settings, etc. …
(Compliance Bar Screen: Create Bar – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
Notes:
- You can create an unlimited number of Compliance Bars to show different icons on different pages, or to cover various uses in other sections of your website.
- The plugin lets you display the Compliance Bar on the main page of your site, even if you are using a specific theme framework (like Genesis, Thesis or Woo), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme settings as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” WordPress page.
- Due to the smaller size of mobile devices, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”
Once you have configured your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …
You have full 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.), the plugin can display pop-ups that force users to accept your website’s terms and disclaimers.
The “Create Pop Up” screen gives you complete control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …
(Pop Ups Screen: Create Pop Up – Image sourced from plugin documentation)
You can create more than one Pop Up for different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your website …
You can also specify a delay time to prevent Pop Ups from displaying as soon as visitors arrive, set a cookie duration to prevent Pop Ups from displaying again within a specific time period, and record the IP addresses of visitors who accept your terms and disclaimers for future reference …
(Pop Ups Section: IP Log Details – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)
EU Cookies
If your business is based in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you need to be aware of EU Cookie law …
Compliance Bar lets you edit the settings for compliance with EU Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” section …
(EU Cookies Screen: 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” area, lists all of your compliance templates and shortcodes, and lets you edit the page content …
General Settings
The “General Settings” area, lets you access general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and getting plugin update notifications …
Testimonials
Here are a couple of the testimonials that plugin users 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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”I wanted to reach out & say Compliance Bar is a truly amazing product for keeping my online marketing efforts on the right side of the internet laws. Not only does it look fantastic on my sites, it is also intuitive and robustly powerful. It is packed full of features to allow me the flexibility to control exactly what my visitors need to see and know” Patrick Mauchant – PT Enviromate Technology
Compliance Bar – Useful Tips
Below are some useful ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:
- Protect against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
- Displaying compliance icons on specific pages only.
- Minimizing refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before purchase.
- If you publish content for adults only on your site, you can force visitors to click to confirm that they are of legal age to view your content.
Product Support
Compliance Bar provides users with a dedicated plugin support team to assist you if you experience any difficulties. Plugin users also get access to full video training manuals.
Additionally, your purchase is backed by a risk-free, 30 day, 200% refund 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 purchasing price.
Software Price
- Single – Install the plugin on 1 of your own domains. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
- Business – Install the plugin on 25 domains that you own. Price = $67.00 (Normally $197).
- Professional Licensing – Can be installed on all domains that you own. Install the plugin on any client site for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.
Note: Current pricing for the product depends on whether there are any promotions or limited-time specials being offered. The above reflects the current price when this review was published. This may or may not be the actual price set by the software developer when you visit the product site and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after purchasing.
Check the plugin’s website for the latest pricing: Compliance Bar
Compliance Bar Plugin – Additional Info
Legal Pages Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert 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 for your peace of mind.
For a demo video of the plugin, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, customer helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar website.
Install This Plugin
Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-driven websites and blogs. We recommend downloading and installing this WordPress plugin if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.
For full details, visit the plugin website: Compliance Bar – Compliance Bar – WP Compliance Plugin
Note: Once again, we are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website. You must do your own due diligence and consult a legal expert about the best way to ensure that your website is compliant with all legal requirements in your country or region.
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