Kori Ashton helps you understand what’s needed on your WordPress website for Privacy Policy, Terms of Service & GDPR compliance.
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Full Transcript
Hey, y’all, welcome to another WordPress Wednesday! I received in a really great question from Kevin, who asked about privacy policy and this GDPR thing. What is it about? Do I need to be concerned about it for my WordPress website? Let’s talk about it!
Hey, y’all, thanks for tuning in to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton, and today we’re gonna look at the GDPR and privacy policy issues for our WordPress websites. How do we handle those things? What are some quick solutions that you can do today to be sure that your website is compliant, and be sure that all your clients’ websites are compliant? Let’s talk about it, I’ve got a couple plugins I wanna show you, and a couple of really quick free solutions for you.
First of all, I have to talk about Pressable. You guys, if you’re looking for a great hosting company that can help you with all of your WordPress issues, if you had questions about this, even, you can reach out to them and ask them, because they love WordPress, and they’re gonna be able to answer WordPress questions. You’ve gotta go check out Pressable! I’ll put a link to them in the description box below, be sure to tell them that you heard about them from Kori Ashton. I would appreciate it. And they are phenomenal for your hosting, and for support, and for security on your WordPress website.
GDPR Compliance
Alright you guys, GDPR. Let’s look at a couple of different solutions. Let’s talk about, first, what the heck is it? Let’s take a look. Alright, so our first stop in finding out what GDPR is all about is over here at EUGDPR.org. That’s where we can see that it’s the General Data Protection Regulation. And this really is all about any traffic that’s coming from the EU, so from Europe.
So, you wanna monitor that inside your Google Analytics. If you have any viewership, any traffic whatsoever, this could affect your WordPress website. You’ll want to add this regulation onto your website so that you’re compliant, and you’re not breaking any laws.
What are Privacy Policies?
So, what does that really mean when we’re talking about privacy policies in general? So, privacy policies are actually required by law on your website for you to disclose to the individual visitor what it is that you’re collecting, what you’re monitoring, and how you use that content. It’s actually very, very important that you have a solution on your WordPress website.
There’s A Plugin For That
This is one of the plugins that I’ve found that I wanna talk to you about today. It does help you become compliant as it helps you add in your Terms of Service and your privacy policy terms into your WordPress website. They’re gonna give you some general conversation, some general terms, and then you’ll go in and add in the specific details to how you’re using the data, how you’re collecting the data.
Why Should I be Concerned?
You might be thinking right now I don’t even know what this means, I don’t know how this affects me, or what I should even be talking about. Think about this:
Do you have a contact form?
If you’re using contact forms, any sort of a contact form on your website that somebody fills out and submits their email address or their name to you, you have now collected data. You now need to be compliant, because you need to be able to tell people how you’re using that content.
Do you track with Google Analytics?
If you’re tracking Google Analytics, you’re collecting data! You’ve collected what browser they use, where they came from, where they went to after they left. You’re collecting data! So, you need to be sure that you have it kind of written in your terms, what you’re doing with that content.
Do you have affiliate links?
Think about if you’re, also have any affiliate links, right? If you have any affiliate links in your website, and you’re selling any products in your website, that are not your products. There are things that you need to notify to people, and maybe they’ll never even read them, but you wanna be sure to be compliant.
Install Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy Plugin
So let’s look at this plugin, plug it in and let you see how it works on your dashboard. So head into your dashboard and click Add New, and we’re gonna go ahead and install the one single plugin that we’re looking at today, the Auto Terms. Is, all you really need to do is search for really quickly Auto Terms, and you should be able to find it right here. Auto Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. As of today, this has been updated very recently, it’s compatible with 4.9.8, which is what I’m running right now, and it has a lot of active installs, and obviously great reviews. So be sure down the road that those things are also in place so that you know you can trust this. You’re gonna click Install, and then you’re gonna click Activate. So, let’s do it, y’all! Here we go, it’s installing, it should just take a matter of a couple seconds here, depending upon how fast your server is, and of course, you wanna click Activate, and then we’re gonna have it over here on the left side.
There you go, it appears right over here on the left side, Auto Terms, Compliance Kits, Settings, License, Contact. So, just so y’all know, there is a premium version of this, that addresses the GDPR. It allows you to have a cookie notice and actual little pop-up. And then it also allows you to have auto-notifications that go out to your individual users as you make an update to these pages. So, it might be well worth the investment to go for the premium version of this, but we’re gonna work on the free version today, ’cause free is always in the budget, right?
So I’m gonna go to Settings, you just wanna be sure that these are setting correctly with your website name, your URL, and your company name. They’re gonna be using these to kind of plugin, or fill in the blank, the different fields. So you wanna just be sure that all these things are set up correctly first out of the gate. Of course, the great state of Texas, there you go, and we’re gonna click Save Changes.
So now you have those things set and it’ll be able to plug those in for you on the pages we’re about to create. Next up is just to click “Add Legal Pages”. Let’s do it, clicking there, takes us over here. Now again you’re gonna have to upgrade if you want the GDPR privacy policy language, but, other than that, we already have a privacy policy here, a Terms and Conditions here, and any other custom legal page that you might wanna create you can create here as well, and they’ll kinda walk you through how to use it. Let’s go into the Terms and Conditions first, click Create.
So, we’re gonna fill in the blank. This is so cool and really, really helpful because sometimes we don’t even know what to put on these pages. So, all you’re gonna do is fill out this information, then click Create! And, again, it’s gonna fill out all the terms here. You can go in and certainly adjust things as you feel more comfortable, make changes to it.
Please don’t just click Publish. Please read through every single one of these steps. If it has something that says please contact us, you can highlight that, link it to your contact page, or you can go ahead right here and put in your phone number, or your email address, right here in this space. Don’t just blanket statement, have these things dropped in, and click Publish, alright? Be sure to read through every single thing and, to save my tush, I’m gonna say reference your legal team, if you do have a legal team, to be certain that this covers all the areas that you need to be compliant, especially if you are selling products directly on your website. Or, especially if you have any sort of products like vaping materials, or alcohol, or anything to do with age-appropriate content. You need to be certain that you address your legal team, and don’t just take these terms and conditions blanketly.
Now that this page is published, I’m gonna show you something really cool that these guys, these developers, just went above and beyond and thought about you guys. So, I love it. This is created, it’s published, watch, I’m gonna go back to the front side of my website now, and I’m gonna click Refresh, and as I do that what it’s done now that this page is published is it’s actually gone ahead in the extreme footer-footer area of my website, and actually added the link for me. I’m gonna keep scrolling down here all the way to the bottom.
Look way down here at the bottom, we’ve got a Terms and Conditions link right down there, that if I click on, it links, goes straight to that website. Beautifully in place, by the way, any shortcode that you saw had my name replaced, so here’s Ask Kori. Everything’s in place, and we have a Legal Terms and Conditions page in there. Isn’t that cool? I didn’t have to go figure out how to add the link down in my footer. They did it all for me.
Now you can go ahead and add another legal page, if you wanted to add in that privacy policy, I think is really important to have. Click Create, the same exact process, just go through and answer the questions as honestly and openly as you can, get all these answered, and click Create. It’s gonna do the same thing, add in the link right next to that Terms and Conditions link.
Now you have your privacy policy page as well. Let me show you one other area that I think is really cool on this, if you go over here to the Compliance Kits area, Link to Legal Pages, Update Notice of Legal Pages, here’s your Cookies Notice, which I think is pretty great, you do have to have a purchase license for both of these, and in those endorsements, so you’ll be able to inform your visitors, that you might have endorsement or affiliate links in your website.
So both of those again are the Premium, but, this right here if we wanted to configure kinda how those links looked, if we didn’t like down at the very bottom of our website, if we didn’t like this white banner that doesn’t really match anything on my website with this black link, they give you the ability go on and change those things. So you can disable if you want.
Let’s say that you already kinda put these things in your footer and you just wanted to add them yourself, you can certainly do that, or you can leave them enabled. Change the background color to anything you want it to be. I’m just gonna show you how silly I can go here, so that you can see it all take effect. Change this, change this. Instead of a dash, if you wanted a pipe, you can do that. Click Save Changes and once that’s done go back to the front side of your website, click Refresh, and now I have a nice red link down there, Terms and Conditions, and of course if I had published that privacy policy page, that would be living down here too.
What a great plugin, you guys, right? All on the budget of free.
Tool Inside WordPress to add Privacy Policy Page
I’ll show you one more quick way that you can get a privacy policy page just kind of on the fly, ’cause actually, inside of WordPress, they give us that tool already. If we were to go into Settings, and go to, let’s go to Settings, and go to Privacy, WordPress thought that hey, you know what, they probably need some help writing a privacy policy page.
You can come here and click Create New Page, and it’s gonna actually generate the privacy policy page for you. All the content again is just kinda this generic wording, so again, you have to read through each one and kinda answer the questions yourself. Be sure that you’re changing out your link for their link. Get rid of any of their conversation, drop in your content, but, out of the box, this is pretty great content to have on your website. And you’ll have a link right here, this privacy policy link, that you can take and put down in your footer, or wherever you’d like to reference that.
So this is another solution that you have in place if you don’t wanna add another plugin. This is already inside your dashboard underneath that Settings, Privacy area.
Be sure that you’re running an updated version of WordPress. If you don’t see that, that might be one of your issues, that you need an updated version of core WordPress. Or perhaps your admin role is not set to Admin, and you need to increase your role capability. So be sure to reference that if you’re having any issues with any of this. I hope this has helped you guys, a lot of people have asked me about the privacy policy, Terms and Conditions, Terms of Use, the GDPR.
I hope this answers your questions. If you have more though, be sure to comment on the video. I’ll try to answer them to best of my ability. Reference your legal team, of course!
I hope you’re having a great WordPress Wednesday. If you haven’t subscribed yet, be sure to subscribe because every Wednesday I’m giving some love out to the WordPress community creating a video just like this to help you improve your online marketing. Thanks so much for watching all the way to the end, y’all! I’ll see you next week, bye everyone!
Bloopers
That this is the General Data Protection Regulation. Basically a regulation that comes in your website when it talks about. Alright, so heading over here to EUGDP, Ah, poo poos!
