Building a new website can be incredibly exciting. You get to design it, pick a logo, create content, engage with users, and more. However, not all aspects of launching a new site are as fun. You’ll also need to take care of details such as drafting terms and conditions agreements, privacy policies, cookie policies, and other similar documents.
The goal of all these documents is to cover you and your website legally. By presenting clear terms and conditions, you can prevent situations where visitors misuse your site or its content. The more comprehensive this document is, the more protected you’ll be.
In this article, we’ll go over several reasons why you need terms and conditions document for your website. We’ll discuss specific concerns and what clauses to include in the document. Then, we’ll show you how to generate a terms and conditions page in WordPress. Let’s get to it!
Why You Need a Terms and Conditions Agreement
The main goal of terms and conditions agreements is to shield yourself from legal liability. However, this document can also help you inform visitors about how you use their data and under which jurisdiction your website falls. Let’s go over each of these points one by one.
Limiting Liability
If you’re a website owner, a Terms and Conditions Agreement can offer you a way to shield yourself from legal action by your site’s users. Once you put it out there on your website, there is a presumption that visitors have read and understood the terms of dealing with your business.
They are presumed to be interacting with your website with the knowledge of the terms you’re imposing on them. Further, they are deemed to have consented to the same. This is an effective defense for you in a possibly sticky legal situation in the future.
This is more often the case with eCommerce websites and websites that include user-generated content. It also protects you from situations arising out of linking to third-party sites or utilizing payment gateways. Needless to say, such an agreement is essential to an eCommerce website.
Content Ownership and Fair Usage
It’s important to let users know that you own the content that you create and put out on your website. What better way to state this than to put a clause in your Terms and Conditions Agreement. Here, you can also let users know how they can use the website content.
For instance, you can forbid reuse in any manner, specify ways in which it can be used, or allow reuse with proper attribution. In this way, your Terms and Conditions Agreement keeps you covered on copyright issues related to your content.
Privacy Concerns
As you may already know, data collection and analysis are at the heart of most website marketing strategies. By and large, website users are okay with websites collecting their personal info in exchange for a personalized experience.
A generalized terms and conditions agreement (or even a more specific privacy policy) is important to obtain users’ consent for collecting personal info, as well as to enforce other very specific conditions to your website.
Such an agreement allows you to control the way in which users interact with your website content. Users get to know that their personal details are being collected and shared in a secure and permissible manner. For instance, visitors may be automatically subscribed to mailing lists. Consequently, relevant ads may pop up on their social media accounts.
Governing Law and Jurisdiction
With the internet reaching all geographies and nations, it’s important to have clarity as to which country’s law will be followed in case of any dispute. The appropriate jurisdiction for settling disputes can also be specified.
By including this information in the terms and conditions, users tacitly agree to resolve disputes in the manner that you outline. This can sometimes be challenged depending on whether the terms you set are legal or not, so we recommend that you check your jurisdiction’s laws regarding internet privacy and fair usage.
This clause can be a lifesaver if you ever find yourself in a dispute. It means you won’t have to hire a foreign lawyer or rush halfway across the world in response to a summons.
What to Include in a Terms and Conditions Agreement?
While there are a few basic conditions that must be included in your Terms and Conditions Agreement, it’s really your call to keep it as simple as you want or as detailed so you can cover every possible eventuality.
In the last section, we went over several of the ways in which a terms and conditions document can benefit your website, including some specific clauses. Let’s recap what those clauses are and go over some other elements you should consider, including:
- Details about your business
- User guidelines that set out how users can interact with your website
- Disclaimers
- Limitation of liability
- Remedies against abuse
- Contact details
- Any warranties or guarantees
- eCommerce-related terms and conditions
- Governing / applicable law and jurisdiction
If you’re drafting a terms and conditions document from scratch and not using any online services to help you, you’re going to need to consult a lawyer. That’s because it’s essential that you draft a document that has as much of a legal basis as possible. Otherwise, you’ll likely end up with terms and conditions that might not be enforceable.
Where and How to Get Your Own Terms and Conditions Agreement?
The terms and conditions agreement is not a standard document and varies from site to site. That being said, the core contents of the agreement for most websites can be very similar.
For this reason, it may not be a bad idea to look at the agreements on other websites to get an idea of how your Agreement should appear. Alternatively, you could also copy/paste from freely available legal templates. Then, you can always tweak the contents to suit the specific needs of your website.
You can also use an online tool to generate the agreement. However, if you’re a serious business, it’s always advisable to take professional help from legal personnel.
If you’re a WordPress user, there’s another way to add legal pages to your website. You can have the pages up and running in no time at all by simply installing a plugin and using it to generate terms and conditions agreements for you.
How to Add a Terms and Conditions Agreement to Your WordPress Site
Let’s go through a step-by-step tutorial on how to add a Terms and Conditions Agreement to your WordPress site using the WP AutoTerms plugin:
We recommend this plugin because it can help you set up pages for terms and conditions agreements, privacy policies, and cookie policies. If you use the premium version of the plugin, it can even set up policy and agreement templates for you.
Step 1: Activate WP AutoTerms and Configure the Plugin
First, you’ll need to install and activate the plugin:
Then, go to the WordPress dashboard. Find WP AutoTerms and open the Settings page of the plugin.
Fill in the details of your website on that page. Make sure the information you fill in is correct before you create your legal pages.
You can update this information at any time. However, keep in mind that using the wrong information might void the validity of your terms and conditions agreement.
Step 2: Create a Terms and Conditions Page
After you’ve set up your plugin, click on WP AutoTerms > Add Legal Pages > Create. Here, you have options to create a Terms and Conditions Agreement or a Privacy Policy page for free. You can also opt to create your own custom legal pages.
For the purposes of this tutorial, let’s go with the Terms and Conditions. Simply click on Create within that section:
You’ll then see a new page open up, and you’ll be required to fill in some details so that your Agreement will be populated with your company information.
These details include your company name, country, ownership of website content, limitation of liability, and the like. Once you’re done, click on Create:
After that, open your new Terms and Conditions page at WP AutoTerms > All Legal Pages. Go ahead and make any changes required. Then, save the changes.
Keep in mind that this doesn’t display the terms and conditions page on your website automatically. You still need to decide where to show the agreement. We’ll cover that in the next section.
Step 3: Display the Terms and Conditions Agreement on Your Website
Now that you have your agreement ready, all that’s left for you to do is the link to the document within your website. Most commonly, this appears as a link in the footer on which users can click to view the full page. Let’s talk about how to copy that approach.
You can use the WP AutoTerms plugin to display a clickable Terms and Conditions link in the footer. To do this, go to Compliance Kits > Enable and click on Configure in the Links to Legal Pages section:
A page will open where you’ll be able to choose background color, text color, and fonts, as well as add custom CSS to the page. Customize the page as you see fit and save the changes when you’re done:
At this stage, the link to the terms and conditions agreement is ready. To check it out, open any page from your website and look at the bottom of it. It’ll be hard to miss the Terms and Conditions link at the bottom in the footer.
Clicking on that link will take a visitor to your Terms and Conditions page, where you can include the clauses that you need for your website:
If you’re not sure what clauses to incorporate, check the previous sections covering what information to include in the agreement. You can also use an agreement generation tool to help you get a basic terms and conditions document ready (which you can then customize).
Wrapping Up
Almost every WordPress website needs a terms and conditions agreement, whether you’re running a blog, an online store, an affiliate site, or even a portfolio. The clauses included in this type of agreement will vary from site to site. For some websites, it’s more important to outline clear, fair usage clauses. Other websites need strong privacy policies or even dispute resolution clauses.
If you’re ready to add a terms and conditions agreement to your WordPress website, we recommend using a plugin. Here’s the process, step by step, including the plugin we recommend:
- Activate WP AutoTerms and configure the plugin.
- Create a Terms and Conditions page.
- Display the Terms and Conditions Agreement on your website.
Do you have any questions about how to set up a terms and conditions page in WordPress? Let’s talk about them in the comments section below!
