Once upon a time people used to write letters on an open post card that anyone can read. There are no privacy problems that time. However, privacy becomes one of the hot topics on internet nowadays. As a WordPress site owner, it is also your responsibility to inform visitors about your data collection and processing policy. As a first step, you have to create a privacy policy page in WordPress setup and assign it in your menu.
Why You Need a Privacy Policy Page?
With Google and other companies trying to track user activities, many countries introduced policies to protect user’s privacy. You as a website owner have an obligation to obey these policies to abide to local laws.
- GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation is a law in EU to protect user privacy
- CCPA – the California Consumer Privacy Act is a data protection law for residents of California in United States.
- If have ecommerce plugins like WooCommerce, you need to link privacy and terms pages before user place order.
Create Privacy Policy Page in WordPress
WordPress makes it easy for site owners to create a good looking privacy page. After installing WordPress, you can go to “Pages > All Pages” section. You will find a “Privacy Policy” page created and in draft status.
Edit the draft privacy page to view the sample content. You can read and update the details as applicable to your website.
WordPress also offers a guide for privacy page details. When you edit the draft privacy page, click on the “View Privacy Policy Guide” link to understand the details of the sample privacy page. The guide introduces the content and provide the source from WordPress and the default twenty twenty-one theme.
Scroll down the end of the guide and click on “Copy this section to clipboard”. You can paste the content in any text editor and prepare the details offline. Remember, this will be the same content already on your sample page. Therefore, you can also directly start editing the content online.
WordPress Privacy Settings
In case, if you have deleted the default privacy page then go to “Settings > Privacy” section. Here you can read the privacy guide and click on the “Create New Page” button to create a sample privacy page.
You can edit, privacy and assign privacy policy page in the same section.
Important Content for Privacy Page
Depending upon the type of your website, your privacy policy page should help users to understand what type of data you collect and process on your website. In addition, it also should emphasize how you will protect the collected user data.
- Tracking Cookies – if you use any tracking cookies with Google Analytics, AdSense, Contact Form submission or Gravatar, make sure to declare the source website’s privacy page. For example, you can link Google Analytics privacy page to inform the user that you are not processing any data and follow Google’s privacy rules.
- Customer Data – this is an important section in your privacy page to inform customers about how you store and process customer orders and personal details. Note that, you can export or erase personal data on your site under “Tools” of the admin panel.
- Financial data – generally plugins like WooCommerce will not store credit card and payment details. However, this can be different based on your site setup. You can mention the details on your privacy page to inform users about how you handle financial details from payments.
- Comments – if you allow comments on your blog, explain how you process the submitted data. You can also show a consent in the comment form to inform users about using cookies to store the details on browser. For this, you can enable “Show comments cookies opt-in checkbox, allowing author cookies to be set” option under “Discussion” settings.
This will insert a line “Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment” in the comment form on the published site as shown below.
Some of the other important details you can include are about membership process, forum handling and media or content uploading. Remember, the sample privacy policy page contains many sections that you may need for your site. Make sure to read the content thoroughly and delete the sections that are not applicable for your site.
Using Privacy Page on Your Site
Now that you know how to create privacy policy page on your site. The next step is to show the page on relevant sections so that users can easily access. As mentioned above, ecommerce plugins will automatically use the privacy policy page during checkout. Some plugins may also use the privacy page setup under “Settings > Privacy” section.
In addition, we recommend you to assign the privacy page in header or footer menu as supported by your theme. You can go to “Appearance > Menus” section and assign the page to relevant menu.
Using Plugins for Creating Privacy Page
Frankly, we do not see any need of using a plugin for this purpose. However, if you need, there is a plugin called WP AutoTerms that you can use.
- After installing and activating the plugin, it will automatically create a privacy page with sample content exactly as explained above. You can also create
- You can go to plugin’s settings page and setup your company name, website name and URL details. Each item has a shortcode that you can insert on your site’s pages to show the assigned value from the settings page.
- The plugin also allows you to create legal pages and link in the footer section.
Final Words
Nowadays, privacy is a big topic from legal perspective to handle personal data with care. WordPress offers multiple settings in the control panel to handle privacy. You can also easily create a privacy policy page by modifying sample content. If that is not sufficient, look for a plugin or a custom solution to make sure you offer sufficient details to the visitors.
Leave a Reply
Your email is safe with us.