Legal
How to write website terms of service
Set out who you are, what the site provides, what visitors may and may not do, who owns the content, what you do not warrant, and which law governs disputes. Terms cannot remove statutory consumer rights, and attempting to makes them unenforceable.
Before you start
- Your legal or trading name and contact details
- A clear description of what the site offers
The steps
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Step 1: Identify yourself
Trading name, legal entity if you have one, and a contact address. Anonymous terms are unenforceable.
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Step 2: Describe what the site is
Information, a shop, a service booking. Set the reader’s expectations.
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Step 3: Set acceptable use rules
No scraping, no attempts to breach security, no unlawful use.
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Step 4: Cover intellectual property
Who owns the content, and what a visitor may do with it.
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Step 5: Disclaim what you cannot promise
Uninterrupted availability, or that general information is advice for a specific situation.
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Step 6: Limit liability lawfully
You cannot exclude liability for death, personal injury or fraud, and you cannot remove consumer statutory rights.
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Step 7: State governing law
Which jurisdiction applies. Cross-border customers make this matter.
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Step 8: Date it and publish it
Linked from the footer of every page, indexable, and reachable in one click.
Terms of service and terms of business are different documents
Terms of service govern using the website. Terms of business govern buying from you — scope, payment, revisions, ownership on final payment. Selling anything needs both, and conflating them is the usual mistake.
The consumer rights limit
In the UK, EU, Canada and Australia, consumer protection law overrides contrary terms. A clause saying "no refunds under any circumstances" is void where a statutory right to refund exists, and including it undermines the rest of the document.
The background behind this
Buying a website: the questions that decide what you actually own covers the reasoning in about 5 minutes — free, ungated, written from client work.
Who wrote this
Anas Bin Masud builds e-commerce sites and does technical SEO for businesses in the UK, Canada, Ireland and Pakistan. These procedures are the ones I run on client work, written down rather than invented — including the ones where the honest answer is that the fix is not available on your current hosting.