Hi this is Jessica and I’m the Marketing Director here at Tiny Frog and today I want to talk about the GDPR and some WordPress features that relate to it. So if you haven’t heard of this, GDPR stands for the Global Data Protection Regulation and it’s basically a European Union law that went into effect back in May. It relates to how companies with websites can track visitors to a site and also collect any data and personal information from a visitor. Even if you’re not located in the European Union the law is actually written very broadly so it can apply to US companies with websites.
Updating Your WordPress
We’ve been helping a lot of our clients update their websites to follow some of these GDPR best practices. So the good news is that a lot of these features and regulations are now built into WordPress. What you want to do is make sure your WordPress core is updated to the latest version. WordPress released a new version back in May and once you do the update there’s different settings now for data storage and different tools where you can delete a user’s data after it’s been submitted. The other thing you’ll notice after you do the update is that there’s now a privacy setting under the general settings area in the dashboard.
Privacy Policy Page
Now what’s really important for GDPR is to make sure that your website has a privacy policy page. And you should take a look at this even if you’ve created that page a while ago. In the dashboard, if you go to the privacy area, WordPress actually created some guidelines so that you can see what’s recommended now in a privacy policy. The final thing you want to make sure is on your website – make sure that you have a link to that privacy policy page in the footer of your site so that it’s accessible to all visitors.
If you have any other questions about updates related to the GDPR and best practices feel free to reach out to our team.