How To Add Privacy Policy In WordPress | The Complete Guide (2024)

How To Add Privacy Policy In WordPress | The Complete Guide (2024)

Adding a Privacy Policy is a must for every website nowadays.  If you are a blogger, business owner, or freelancer, it is recommended that you must add a privacy policy on your website.

If you are still not clear about what exactly a Privacy Policy is and why it is necessary for your website, then this guide is for you. At the end of this guide, you will learn different ways to create a privacy policy and will be able to add a privacy policy to your WordPress website. 

What is a Privacy Policy?

“A privacy policy is a statement or a legal document that discloses some or all of the ways a party gathers, uses, discloses, and manages a customer or client’s data. It fulfills a legal requirement to protect a customer or client’s privacy.”-Wikipedia

Every website collects some sort of data from its users in different ways. According to the law in many countries, websites are required to disclose the information they collect about their visitors, and how this information is used.

Below are some of the ways in which WordPress website gathers user information:

  1. Comment forms: Collecting the user’s name and email address through comment forms.
  2. Google Analytics: Using Google Analytics to track user behavior and traffic source.
  3. Contact forms: Collecting user details through your website’s contact form.
  4.  Advertisement: If you are allowing third-party website advertisements using Google Adsense, Facebook Pixels or other ad-platforms tracking code.
  5. Subscriber list: Collecting user details to add them to your email subscription list.

If you are using any of these ways to collect information about your user, it goes without saying that you need to have a privacy policy page published on your website.

Do I need a privacy policy on my WordPress website?

Having a privacy policy page on your website will protect your business from legal issues and also helps foster user trust. Apart from this, you will need a privacy policy for the following reasons:

  • Helps in SEO: Google and other search engines love to rank sites with high authority. A privacy policy is one way to build trust with search engines.
  • Running online advertisements: If you want to run online advertisements on platforms like Google Adsense or Facebook Ads you will require a privacy policy of your website.
  • Adherence to the law: Government agencies like FTC (Federal Trade Commission) require you to have a privacy policy for your website.

Also, to comply with GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) you will need to have a privacy policy on your website.

What is the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)?

“The General Data Protection Regulation 2016/679 is a regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individual citizens of the European Union and the European Economic Area. It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas.”- Wikipedia

This law is applicable to every website even if you are not from the EU countries.

What is the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act)?

“The California Consumer Privacy Act is a state statute intended to enhance privacy rights and consumer protection for residents of California, United States.” Wikipedia

This law is applicable to those websites which collect personal information from California residents.

What should you write in the privacy policy?

Usually, your privacy policy page should include all the ways you collect or intend to collect user information on your website.

You should write the following information in your Privacy Policy page:

  1. The details about the data you collect from users visiting your website.
  2. Explain to users how you collect their information. For example, it could be through web beacons, site logs, cookies, signup forms, comment forms, etc.
  3. If you use any third-party ad networks like Google Adsense, mention them all.
  4. Explain your intent to collect user data. This could be for optimizing your website, improving user experience, and customizing your web page content based on visitors’ browser type and/or other information.
  5. Explain how users can opt out of these cookies and include links to opt-out pages on your site and third-party advertiser websites.
  6. Tell your users how they should contact you if they have additional questions or require more information about your Privacy Policy.

There are many ways to add a Privacy Policy in your WordPress website. You can find dozens of websites or WordPress plugins on the internet that can help you to generate your privacy policy page easily.

3 Easy Ways To Create A Privacy Policy

In this guide, we will discuss three easy ways to generate a Privacy Policy page for your WordPress website.

First method:

Using WordPress Inbuilt Privacy Policy

If you have a simple blog or basic e-commerce, a standard policy page would suffice. To help the community, the latest WordPress now comes with an inbuilt Privacy Policy using which you can easily create a privacy policy page for your WordPress website. If you have not updated your WordPress yet, we recommend you to update it soon. 

To add a Privacy Policy using the WordPress default privacy policy generator, follow the below steps:

  1. From your WordPress dashboard, go to Settings > Privacy 

You’ll find that WordPress has already drafted a privacy policy page for your website. You can click on the “Use This Page” button or “Create New Page” button to use this drafted page as your Privacy policy page or you can create a new one respectively.

If you want to edit the default draft or want to make some changes to it, you need to click on the “Edit” button to do so (refer below picture)

Now, a new page will open where you’ll be able to edit and make changes to your Privacy Policy page.

You will find that it has sections explaining how a WordPress website may collect personal information. It will include sections like:

  • Who we are
  • What personal data do we collect and why do we collect it
  • How long do we retain your data
  • What rights do you have over your data
  • And many more

You’ll also notice that it also has sections with no information below them. For example, sections like Contact forms, Analytics, How we protect your data, and many more. 

As for Contact forms you can mention all the information you collect from visitors and how you will use it. Likewise, go all through such sections and complete the privacy policy page as per GDPR and CCPA guidelines.

If you are having difficulty in completing the privacy policy, our second method will surely help you out. In the second method, you’ll learn about a few tools using which you can generate your privacy policy and you can easily copy and paste the content in the above editor to publish it.

After reviewing your Privacy Policy page, click on the “Publish” button to save your changes.

Now, let’s add your Privacy Policy page link in WordPress. You can add a link to your Privacy Policy page in the footer of your website. Follow the below steps to do so:

1. First, you will need to create a new custom menu by visiting Appearance > Menus 

2. Next, click on the “Create a new menu” link on the top.

3. Now, you need to provide a new name for your custom navigation menu.

4. On the left column, click on the “View All” tab to view all the pages and select all the required pages you want to add. And then click on the “Add to Menu” button.

5. Now, all your selected pages will appear under your newly created menu. You can now arrange menu items by simply dragging them up or down. 

Once you are done, click on the “Save Menu” button to save your changes.

6. After that go to Appearance > Widgets

7. Now, click on “Navigation Menu” > Select “Footer Widget” and click on the “Add Widget” button.

8. Now on the right column, select the custom navigation menu you created earlier in the widget settings and click on the Save button to publish your changes. 

The Privacy Policy page link is now added successfully in the website footer. 

Second method:

Using WordPress Privacy Policy Generator Plugins

1. WPLegalPages Free Plugin

free WordPress privacy policy plugin.

WP Legal Pages is a popular free WordPress privacy policy plugin. The standard policy generated using this plugin is enough for simple websites. It also covers other legal pages that may be required on websites.

There is also a WP Legal Pages Pro WordPress plugin to generate a custom privacy policy that covers all different aspects that a small business website would usually to do, e.g. lead capture, marketing, user profiling, disclaimers etc.

Features: 

  • 25+ ready-to-use legal templates
  • Easy to install
  • Easy to edit policy pages
  • Option to force agreement

WordPress plugins make this whole process of generating a Privacy Policy quicker and much easier than the above-mentioned methods. Below we have listed 3 top WordPress Privacy Policy generator plugins using which you can easily generate your Privacy Policy in a few fractions of time.

Here is a video giving an example of how to create an Impressum very easily using WP Legal Pages Pro.

2. WP Autoterms

WP Autoterms

WP Autoterms helps you create three legal pages on your WordPress website such as a Privacy Policy, Terms & Conditions agreement or Cookies Policy.

Features:

  • Create a Custom Legal Page
  • Automatically link to your legal pages
  • Notify users when you update your legal pages

Third method:

Using Third-Party Tools To Generate A Privacy Policy

You can also use some third-party tools to generate a Privacy Policy page for your website.

But one major drawback of using these tools is that you have to generate, copy and reformat each time you want to update your Privacy Policy for your website.

Apart from this, these tools are a great way to generate high-quality legal pages for your website and below are the top 3 privacy policy generators available on the market today:

1. TermsFeed

Termsfeed

TermsFeed generates high-quality legal documents within minutes, and it has affordable pricing. It is the quickest, most easy-to-use, and best overall privacy policy generator available on the market today.

Pros

  • Very easy to use
  • One-time cost for legal document generation
  • Only pay for what you need
  • User-friendly interface, even for people who aren’t tech-savvy
  • Personalized app or website privacy policy generation

Cons

  • Free templates don’t include all legally-mandated clauses
  • Free policies are not as in-depth and comprehensive as premium policies

2. Iubenda

Iubenda - Privacy Policy Generator

Generating, updating, and integrating policies on Iubenda is very easy and user-friendly. Using the Iubenda dashboard, you can update your policy whenever you want. It can easily generate policies that are professional, self-updating, and easily customizable from 650+ clauses.

Pros

  • Supports multiple languages and countries
  • 650+ legal clauses crafted by a team of legal experts in international law
  • Always up-to-date and compliant with the latest regulations
  • Multiple ways to integrate the privacy policy
  • Beautiful user-friendly interface

Cons

  • Limited basic/free plans
  • Recurring payments or payments on a monthly/yearly basis

3. FreePrivacyPolicy.com

FreePrivacyPolicy.com includes several compliance verification tools to help you effectively protect your customer’s privacy while limiting your liability, all while adhering to the most notable state and federal privacy laws and 3rd party initiatives. They’ve helped 815,960 website owners generate almost 900,000 understandable, comprehensive, and (mostly) legally-compliant policies all for a low, low price of absolutely free.

Pros

  • No payment or sign-up involved
  • Only pay for the add-ons you want
  • Comprehensive legal coverage

Cons

  • The Questionnaire is long and takes a while to fill out the information
  • The Privacy policy must be downloaded, no accessible web version
  • Free policies don’t include all clauses

Using these policy generators, you can get high-quality legal statements as easy as ticking a few boxes and making sure your website is compliant with GDPR and CCPA guidelines.

Conclusion

No plugin or third-party tool can assure 100% GDPR compliance. However, it can help you get started on the path to GDPR compliance. If you are low on budget and want to have more control over your privacy policy, go for WordPress plugins which costs less as compared to third-party tools. 

That’s all. We hope this guide helped you add a Privacy Policy in your WordPress website. Share your thoughts in the comments below!

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1 Comment on “How To Add Privacy Policy In WordPress | The Complete Guide (2024)

  1. This is an awesome article. You described all the points about how to privacy in a WordPress website. After reading this article I know better about privacy policy. Thanks a lot.

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