Tips for writing and clearly displaying your site’s terms.

To help manage the relationship between your website and its visitors, consider establishing legal policies or terms for your website or online business. Certain regulations may require you to display specific legal information on your website, such as:

• Terms of service
• A privacy policy
• A cookie policy

This guide includes tips for writing and displaying your terms in a clear, and accessible way.

Note: All businesses have unique needs. The ideas in this guide aren’t meant to be exhaustive. Squarespace can’t provide more specific help on what language to use in your terms, policies, or legal notices. You should contact an attorney for specific advice about your business.

Writing your terms

Website terms

Your website terms should let your visitors know what to expect when they visit or make purchases from your site, and how to interact with content on your site. You should let visitors know:

• Who you are and how to contact you
• That by using your site, your website terms apply to their use
• What terms apply to their use of the site and your services
• Your sales, delivery, and return policies
• Which payment methods are accepted
• The rules for making public comments on your site, including that copyright infringement in comments is not allowed
• That they can’t share links to protected Member Site assets, like images and videos
• How to report copyright infringement
• That your content is protected by copyright laws
• That your content can’t be used for commercial purposes by others
• What country’s laws will govern the terms

Privacy policy

A privacy policy provides clarity regarding your use of visitors' information. Consider posting your website's or business' privacy policy to a page on your site to document:

• What information you collect
• Why you collect that information
• How you collect that information
• What you do with that information (To learn more about what Squarespace does with visitor data, see section 12 of our Privacy Policy)
• How you share that information
• How long you'll store that information
• How your site uses cookies (For example, in your terms, you can include this list of cookies your site uses)

Here are some sample messages for your Privacy Policy.

If you're using Acuity Scheduling, you can use a Scheduling intake form to add a privacy policy to your scheduler. To learn more, visit Client intake forms and agreements in Scheduling.

Displaying terms on your site

Checkout (stores only)

If you use Squarespace Commerce, you can add return policies, terms of service, and privacy policies to your checkout page. Once added, your checkout page will have links that open these policies in a pop-up window.

Cookie banner

Certain laws may require you to inform visitors of, and obtain their consent to, the use of cookies. You can do this by adding a cookie banner to your site.

Footer

In your footer, add text or links to Not Linked pages that contain your policies. This makes key information accessible from nearly any page. You can also add text to the site footer. To learn more, visit Editing footers.

Navigation

Adding navigation links is another way of making your policies more accessible without taking away from the main focus of your site. You can add your policies to a single page, or as multiple pages grouped into a dropdown. In version 7.0, some templates offer secondary navigation areas.

Newsletter block disclaimer

If you collect email addresses in a newsletter block, you can add information about how you use this data to the Disclaimer field. This text displays below the email field in the form. It says “We respect your privacy” as a starting point, but you can change it.

Announcing your terms

You can notify visitors about recent policy changes with an announcement bar or promotional pop-up. These methods are highly visible and ensure that visitors are aware of important information.