NB: These are generic instructions on ways you can start becoming GDPR-compliant. This is not a comprehensive guide to your legal obligations, and may not be applicable for your particular situation. You should fully research the rules and regulations to ensure that you are fulfilling your legal obligations.
Your first step in becoming GDPR-compliant is to add a privacy policy to your website to tell visitors what personal data you collect, what you do with it, and how they can access this data or have it removed.
You may have noticed a message on your WordPress dashboard telling you that WordPress has added new privacy tools. The easiest way to generate a basic privacy policy page for your site is to use their template as a starting point.
To do this open up your dashboard (http://yourdomain.com/wp-admin) and look for the Settings section. Under this you will see a new heading called Privacy where you can generate your page.
Now it’s as simple as using the ‘Create New Page’ button and wordpress will generate a default template based on what it can automatically assess about your website’s requirements.
When this has completed you will be taken to a draft privacy policy page like this
You will need to edit and review this page to ensure that it’s accurate and covers everything your need for your particular website. The ‘Check out our guide’ link here will give you some help. However for now let’s go ahead and publish the page as is so we can add it to our website.
Now that you have a privacy page, you can add it to your navigation menu so that users can easily find it.
In your Dashboard go to the Appearance section and choose Menus.
Select your navigation menu to edit and search for the privacy page you just created. Check the box and use the ‘Add to Menu’ button for it to be placed at the bottom of your current menu links.
It’s really important now to scroll down to the bottom of the navigation menu. Make sure the Privacy Policy link is where you want it to be (you can move it up and down, or under another menu item) then you have to ‘Save Menu’ to apply the changes.
Now if you go to your website you will find your privacy policy is available for visitors to view.
The next steps include reviewing the plugins and software that you’re using on your website and updating this basic template to include all the required information. A cookie consent is also required by law. These steps will be covered in future blog posts (which you can subscribe to using the button below).
