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One of the worst things that can happen to a website owner is to receive a notice of legal action as a result of breaking the law.

If your website doesn’t comply with laws designed to protect consumer rights, you’re breaking the law.

Being non-compliant not only puts you at risk of incurring significant financial losses, but also the cost to your reputation. Why risk your money and your good reputation, when you can protect yourself so easily and inexpensively? In this article, we review a simple and inexpensive WordPress solution that can help make your site compliant in minutes.

Does Your Website Or Blog Comply With The Law?

As the cybersphere continues growing at an extraordinary rate and the rules of the game constantly change, it’s important to stay informed about what’s happening and to make sure that your website remains compliant, especially if your digital presence is a fundamental aspect of your overall business strategy.

If you do not display certain legal pages on your site (e.g. terms and conditions of use, privacy policy, earning disclaimers, etc.), many third-party sites like Google won’t let you advertise, sites like ClickBank won’t approve your digital products on their network, PayPal could shut down your account and withhold payment of your funds, Facebook will suspend your web applications, and you will not be accepted into most advertising and affiliate marketing networks.

If your online business is not in compliance, you could face a multitude of penalties, including fines, having your website shut down, even jail time!

At the very least, without making it clear to your visitors that your site complies with legal requirements and regulations, expect visitor trust and confidence in your business to seriously diminish.

(In addition to legal and regulatory compliance, almost all third-party websites require you to comply with their policies!)

Legal Disclaimer: We are not lawyers and we are not offering legal advice on our website.

The purpose of this post is to make you aware that:

1. Your website may be subject to many legal requirements in accordance with compulsory laws that govern your business,
2. The importance of being compliant with the terms of service of third-party providers whose products or services you are promoting or endorsing online, and
3. There are solutions that can help your site become more compliant, such as the tool that we discuss below.

If your website or blog is lacking in terms of compliance, there is a simple plugin for WordPress users that you should know more about.

Today’s WordPress Plugin Is …

Compliance Bar – WordPress Legal Plugin

Plugin Description

Compliance Bar Plugin is a complete compliance and disclaimer solution for your website …

Learn more here: Compliance Bar

Plugin Benefits

Here we have listed just some of the many benefits of using Compliance Bar to instantly make your website legally compliant:

Be Up And Running In Minutes

Compliance Bar installs like any WordPress plugin. Just upload the plugin file to your Plugins folder via your administrator login and activate.

Easily Editable Page Templates

Easily edit the default templates inside the plugin from the settings menu using the WordPress visual content editor.

24/7 Support

Compliance Bar plugin provides a dedicated team to help users.

Additional plugin benefits include:

• Customized Templates: 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 complete library of training videos is provided.
• Can Be Used Anywhere In The World: As long as you consult someone who is qualified to give you legal advice to ascertain if the built-in 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 For All Website Purposes: As long as your website or blog is powered by WordPress, you can use the plugin for every website purpose. Select only the types of disclaimers which pertain to your particular business model (e.g. affiliate or CPA marketing, business services, AdSense, AdWords, adult, medical, etc) and leave out those that you don’t need.

Compliance Bar Features

Compliance Bar Plugin provides a number of features to web site owners. Below we have listed just a few of these:

• Fast and easy to install and set up. Ready to use in no time.
• Display Attractive Icons – Display links to your legal pages using attractive icons that can be positioned anywhere in your page. You can also upload your own icons.
• Display Restricted Information – If your site includes content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, ecigs, adult-related, etc.), the plugin can display pop-ups that require users to accept your website’s terms or disclaimers.
• EU Cookie Compliance – If you are based in Europe or display your content to EU visitors, you need to make users aware of your user cookies and notify them of how you use them. The plugin displays an attractive bar that notifies users and protects your website from non-compliance issues.
• Records & Stores IP Acceptance – Compliance Bar records and stores the IP address of your visitors for reference, just in case someone accepts your terms or disclaimers and then claims they didn’t.
• Shortcode Driven – Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to populate templates with your personal information. These shortcodes also allow you to place information anywhere on your site, (even in the pop-ups).
• Mobile Friendly – Compliance Bar has settings for displaying on mobile devices and tablets and can display mobile optimized icons automatically depending on visitor mobile browsers.

Plugin Features – Details

After installing and activating the plugin, a section where the plugin’s settings can be configured is added to your WordPress backend.

Let’s briefly review these …

User Profile

There are a number of default categories in this screen where you can input your business information into entered (e.g. “Business Name,” “Registered Company Address,” “Contact Phone,” “Market Niche,” etc.). Not all categories are required, but some are (e.g. “Contact Name,” “Company Phone Number,” etc.)

(Compliance Bar User Profile Page – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)

Compliance Bar uses shortcodes to automatically populate the information you’ve inputted into your User Profile fields into your legal pages …

(Compliance Bar User Profile Section: Shortcodes – Image sourced from plugin documentation)

Once the minimum required (i.e. compulsory) information has been input into the plugin settings fields, you can then access the other plugin section.

Compliance Pages

The “Compliance Pages” screen contains all of the page templates …

(Compliance Bar Plugin: Compliance Pages – Image source: plugin documentation)

Below is the complete list of legal templates made available by the plugin when we last checked their site:

• About Us
• AdSense Disclaimer
• Affiliate Agreements
• Affiliate Disclosure Statement
• 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 blog or website is a simple process. Just select the check boxes next to the pages you want to create and click the “Save” button at the bottom of the “Compliance Pages” section …

(Compliance Bar: Legal Pages – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)

Your legal pages will then be created and added to your “Pages” section.

Compliance Bar Icons

The plugin comes with a default set of icons for referencing your legal pages …

The Compliance Bar icons can be changed. 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: Compliance Template Icons – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)

Edit / Delete Compliance Page Templates

You can easily edit and delete the legal disclaimers from the “Compliance Pages” area, just like any other page in WordPress …

(Compliance Bar: Edit Compliance Templates – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)

Tips

• Editing is recommended, as the pages contain generic content.
• The plugin notifies you if it detects existing similar pages on your site (e.g. pages created before you installed the plugin).

Compliance Bar

The plugin settings area provides many options to customize the Compliance Bar, including where to position the bar, displaying links or icon images, background colors and images, icon size, specifying which pages should be included 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 – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)

Notes:

• You can create a number of Compliance Bars to display different icons on different pages, or to cover different uses in other sections of your website.
• The plugin lets you display a Compliance Bar on the front page of your site, even if you are using a specific theme framework (like Genesis, Thesis or WooThemes), where the home page is specifically configured through the theme itself as a built-in template, and not as a normal “static” page.
• Due to the smaller size of mobile screens, you can only select up to a certain number of page icons to display if you turn Mobile Settings “on.”

Once you have specified your Compliance Bar settings, it will display links to your compliance pages using a visually appealing icon bar on your site …

You have complete control over the location on your pages where you would like the compliance bar to appear …

PopUps

If you plan to show content that should be restricted to certain age groups (e.g. information related to alcohol, tobacco, dating, etc.), the plugin can display popups that require users to accept your site’s terms and disclaimers.

The “Create Pop Up” tab gives you full control over the settings and wordings of your pop ups …

(Pop Ups Section: Create Pop Up – Screenshot source: plugin documentation)

You can create more than one Pop Up displaying on different pages, or to cover a multitude of uses throughout your site …

You can also specify a delay time if you don’t want a Pop Up to display as soon as visitors arrive, 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 – Image source: plugin documentation)

EU Cookies

If you do business in the EU or display your content to visitors in the EU, you must be aware of EU compliance requirements …

Compliance Bar lets you customize the settings for compliance with EU User Cookies requirements, including the wording of your notification message and link text in the “EU Cookies” tab …

(EU Cookies Section: Manage Settings – Image 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 legal pages and shortcodes, and lets you modify the page content …

General Settings

The “General Settings” area, gives you access to general information, such as promoting and sharing the plugin and receiving plugin update notifications …

User Feedback

Here are some of the testimonials customers have provided for 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)

***

“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

Plugin Tips

Here are a few additional ways to use The Compliance Bar Plugin:

• Protecting against content theft by spelling out terms of use of your website.
• Display compliance icons on specific pages of your site only.
• Minimize refund disputes by clearly spelling out refund terms before customers purchase.
• If your site published adult content, 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 dedicated plugin support to assist users with anything they need. You also get access to complete video training manuals.

Additionally, your purchase is backed by a no-risk, 30 day, 200% refund guarantee. If your edition of Compliance Bar does not work within 30 days of purchase and it cannot be fixed within 48 business hours (M – F), the plugin developers will refund double your purchase price.

Plugin Pricing

• Single User License – Can be installed on one domain that you own. Cost = $47 (Normally $127)
• Business Licensing – Can be installed on up to twenty-five sites that you own. Cost = $67.00 (Normally $197).
• Professional – Install the plugin on multiple of your own domains. Install the plugin on all client sites for payment or part of a paid service. Cost = $97.00.

Note: The price of the product can vary, depending on whether there are any promotions or limited-time special offers. Currently, the software is being retailed for the amounts shown above. This may or may not be the actual pricing charged by the product developer when you visit the website and you may be shown additional upsells or one-time offers after your purchase.

Check the plugin’s website for current pricing details: Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Compliance Bar – Additional Info

Legal Pages Approved By Lawyers – The plugin developers assert on their website that all legal templates have been reviewed and approved by a leading lawyer. 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 showing plugin usage, including help documentation and tutorials, FAQs, support helpdesk, contact details and more, visit the Compliance Bar Plugin website.

Download The Plugin

Compliance Bar is an easy-to-use, simple and cost-effective solution for WordPress-powered sites. We recommend installing this plugin for WordPress users if you want immediate peace of mind and legal protection.

For complete details, check out the plugin here: Compliance Bar Plugin – Compliance Bar Plugin – Website Compliance Plugin For WordPress

Disclaimer: 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 fully complies with all legal requirements wherever your business is based.

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Disclaimer: This site is not associated with WordPress or any of the WordPress products written about on this site. We may derive a financial benefit from sales of products advertised, reviewed or linked to from this site. The product images used in this review have been sourced from the plugin’s own website.