Imprint and privacy basics, in plain English
Grab an hour and a phone, and find out how much of your imprint and privacy page is quietly describing somebody else's business instead of yours.
Most small business websites have an imprint page and a privacy page that nobody has ever read — including the owner. They were copied out of a generator, pasted in, and forgotten. That's a problem, because these pages are supposed to describe your business in plain English, and a copied page describes someone else's.
One thing up front: I'm not a lawyer, and this isn't legal advice. What applies to you depends on where you trade and what you sell — a physiotherapy practice, a bakery and a freelance photographer are not in the same position. If there's anything unusual about your situation, pay someone qualified to look at it properly. It's a one-off job, not an annual subscription.
The imprint answers exactly one question
An imprint page — you'll also see it called a legal notice, or company details, or just "about this site" — exists so a visitor can find out who is behind the website and how to reach them. That's the whole job. If you'd put it on your letterhead, it probably belongs here.
Broadly: the trading name, and the name of whoever is actually responsible. An address where post genuinely arrives. A route to a human, which in practice means an email address and usually a phone number. Registration and VAT details, if your business has them. And if you work in a regulated trade, whoever regulates you and the title you hold. The precise list varies by country, so check what applies where you are rather than lifting a page off a business three borders away.
What doesn't vary: the page has to be easy to find. A link in the footer of every page, labelled something obvious. If a customer has to hunt for it, it isn't doing the one job it has.
Your privacy page should describe what your site actually does
Here's the mistake nearly every small site makes. The privacy page explains analytics, an ad pixel, a newsletter tool and a job applicant portal — and the site has none of those things. That isn't harmless padding. It's inaccurate, which is precisely the opposite of the point.
So work it out before you write it. There are really only two questions worth asking.
What do you keep? If you have a contact form, the answers land somewhere — an inbox, a spreadsheet, a CRM you signed up for two years ago and stopped opening. Say where they go, and roughly how long you hang onto them. Your host also records who visited and when, whether you asked it to or not. Nearly every site does, so it belongs in the text.
What do you borrow? This is the one that catches people out. Fonts, an embedded map, a video player, a booking widget, a review badge, a chat bubble nobody answers — anything arriving from a domain you don't own means your visitor's browser is quietly introducing itself to another company on your behalf. Go through them and ask honestly which ones you'd miss. Fonts can live on your own server. A map is often just an address and a link.
Whatever survives those two questions is what your privacy page describes. Nothing else earns a place in it.
Cookie banners: you may not need one
Plenty of small sites add a cookie banner because everyone else has one. But a banner isn't decoration — it's a question you're putting to the visitor, and it only makes sense if you're doing something they'd genuinely need to say yes to. If you aren't, all you've built is a door someone has to open before they can read your opening hours.
Which is why the stripping-out comes first, not last. Fewer borrowed pieces means less to explain, a faster site, and fewer things that can change under you without telling you.
Where the text comes from, and the step everyone skips
Generators are fine. Free ones, paid ones, ones from law firms, templates from a trade body. Answer some questions, get some text back. Nothing wrong with any of that.
Then comes the bit almost nobody bothers with: read what came out. Slowly. Anything that isn't true of your business, cut. It says you run a newsletter you've never sent? Gone. Still has "[Your Company Name]" sitting halfway down the page? Fill it in — browse a few small business sites and you'll spot live placeholders more often than you'd like.
Then diary a check-up for twelve months out. These pages don't expire; businesses drift. New premises, a new number, a booking tool somebody added, a supplier swapped. Nothing announces itself. The page just stops being true.
What to do this week
Give it an hour, on your phone, from the sofa:
- Try to reach both pages from three different places on your site. If one of them is a dead end, the footer link is missing somewhere.
- Read your own address and phone number out loud. Are those the ones you actually use now?
- Find one thing on the privacy page your site doesn't do, and delete it. There's usually at least one.
- Ask whoever built the site which outside companies it loads things from. If nobody knows, that's your answer.
Then close the laptop and get back to the work that brings people through the door. These two pages matter far less to your bottom line than whether your hours and contact details are easy to find, or whether the site covers what a small business website actually needs. Get them accurate once, then stop thinking about them.
