What is the GDPR policy and how to comply with GDPR on your blog?
GDPR stands for General Data Protection Regulation. It is legislation to protect the privacy of EU citizens, particularly with regard to the way personal data is collected and stored. In this article I’m going to show you how to comply with GDPR on your WordPress blog.
If you have visitors to your websites or squeeze pages from EU countries then there are things that you need to do to comply with the requirements of GDPR before 25 May 2018.
Now don’t panic!
If you are just collecting email addresses and building a list in an autoresponder then a simple consent statement on your opt-in pages and in the footer of your emails may be all you need.
Some people are recommending using a check box and statement on squeeze pages but this makes the whole process very cumbersome and may not be entirely necessary. I’m not legally entitled to advise you on this but I can refer you to this legal argument that indicates that it isn’t, strictly, required here:
The other method, and this is implicitly the correct way to obtain someone’s consent, is to use double opt-in. Remember that, if you do this, you can’t withhold whatever it is that the subscriber has signed up for even if they don’t consent.
So you should always take people to your download page whether or not they consent to receive messages from you. Again, it’s a messy way of doing things and I’m personally not doing this but sticking with single opt-in.
For more information on GDPR compliance on squeeze pages, I’ve gone into it in more depth here:
Now, if you have a blog and you’re collecting email addresses there, whether it’s on a contact form, using squeeze pages, pop-ups and so forth, or even in comments, then you need to update your privacy policy.
And if you’re using cookies at all, and remember that Facebook Pixels, Google Analytics and other trackers do place cookies, or if you are running affiliate promotions, then you need a cookie statement too.
That’s a little bit more complicated, which is why I’m showing you how to comply with GDPR in this video:
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Watch the video to see how you can use a couple of free plugins for WordPress blogs that will give you GDPR compliance for personal, I.e, non-commerce, WordPress blogs.
Hope you find this useful
Read more about GDPR compliance on your squeeze pages here: how-to-comply-with-gdpr-on-your-squeeze-page/
You may also want to upgrade your WordPress blog to https:// – see how to do that here