Who is concerned, and why it is broader than people think
The obligation does not target « online shops ». It targets anyone publishing an online communication service as part of a professional activity. A brochure website with no form, no shop and no newsletter is concerned.
The logic of the text is simple: a visitor must be able to know who is speaking and how to reach them, without having to investigate. That is the counterpart of the freedom to publish.
A useful nuance for freelancers worried about exposing their home address: a professional working from home must provide identification details, but may use a registered business address service. Hiding them entirely is not an option; using a business address is.
This article describes French and European requirements. If you operate elsewhere, the principle holds but the exact list varies, and your national business support service publishes it.
The list, depending on your situation
For any professional website:
- The company or trading name, or first and last name for a sole trader.
- The registered address, a phone number and an email address.
- The company registration number.
- For a company: the legal form and the share capital.
- The VAT number, if you are registered for VAT.
- The name of the publication director.
- The name, company name, address and phone number of the host.
- For a regulated profession: the professional body, the title, the state that granted it, and the applicable rules.
If you sell to individuals, add: the terms of sale, information on the right of withdrawal, the legal guarantees, and the details of a consumer mediator you have signed up with. That last point is a paid membership to arrange, not a sentence to copy.
The three most frequent omissions
1. The publication director. Almost always missing from the legal notices generated automatically by website builders. For a company it is in principle the legal representative. It is short to add and appears on every compliance checklist.
2. The host. Many websites name their web agency instead of their actual host. They are not the same thing: the host is the company whose servers deliver the pages. If you do not know who that is, the invoice for your domain name or your subscription names them.
3. The consumer mediator. This is the costliest omission for a website selling to individuals, because it cannot be fixed by writing a line: you must first join a mediation scheme. Many selling websites display the mention without the membership, which is worse than nothing.
A fourth point, formal but frequent: the legal notice must be reachable from every page, usually through a footer link. Publishing it on a page nothing links to does not satisfy the obligation.
Legal notice and privacy policy are two documents
People confuse them, and some website builders merge them. They are two distinct obligations, from two different texts.
The legal notice answers « who publishes this website and how do I reach them ». The privacy policy answers « what data do you collect, why, for how long, and what are the person's rights ». A website with no form and no tracker has little to write in the second, but the moment there is a contact form, a newsletter or an audience measurement tool, it becomes mandatory.
The detail of that second document, with a usable template, is covered in our article on the privacy policy. The question of consent to trackers is covered in the article on cookies.
Where to put it, and in what form
The text says the information must be made available « in an easily, directly and permanently accessible manner ». In practice that settled into a stable, expected usage: a footer link, present on every page of the site, leading to a dedicated page.
Three forms cause problems, and they are common:
- A legal notice in a modal window. The content does not exist in the page code until the visitor clicks. So it is neither indexable, nor readable by a checking tool, nor easy to copy. Prefer a real page with its own address.
- A legal notice in a PDF. Technically reachable, but inconvenient, poorly read by machines, and rarely updated.
- A legal notice merged with the terms of sale. Nothing forbids it, but a visitor looking for your registration number should not have to wade through twelve contractual clauses. Keep them apart.
A formal point that matters for bilingual websites: if your site exists in two languages, the legal notice must be reachable from both versions. The authoritative version is the one in the language of the country of establishment, and it is honest to write that plainly in the translation.
One last practical tip: date the page. An « updated on… » line saves you wondering, two years from now, whether the content still reflects your situation.
What our audit measures
The legal compliance category holds 2 checks, and it is the smallest in the audit: the presence of legal pages, and whether they are reachable in one click from the homepage. Mentioning them without a clickable link is not enough.
The limit matters and we state it plainly: our audit detects the existence of those pages, it does not read their content and does not judge their completeness. No automated tool can verify that your registration number is correct or that you really joined a mediation scheme. A score of 100 in this category means the pages exist and are linked, not that they are compliant.
Checking the content is a matter of reading it, by you or by an adviser. The list above serves as the grid.