What a compliant website means in plain words

Four things people mean by compliant

When someone asks whether a website is compliant, they usually mean one of four things and rarely say which. Accessibility. Honest claims and the advertising rules. Privacy. Web standards.

They are different jobs with different owners. Some can be checked by a machine on every save. Some can only be checked by you, because only you know whether a claim is true.

Nothing here is legal advice. It is a map of the four, so you know which question you are asking.

Accessibility, so every visitor can use the page

An accessible page works for a person using a screen reader, a keyboard alone, a zoomed-in phone, or a screen with the contrast turned up. Headings in order, a label on every field, text that passes contrast, links that make sense on their own.

Most of that is structure, and structure is what a builder controls. The words, and whether an image description is true, are yours. The ADA page and the WCAG page go deeper.

The person this matters to is not rare. A broken arm, a phone in bright sun, a tired reader at the end of the day. They all lean on the same structure.

Honest claims and the advertising rules

Advertising rules in most places come down to one idea. Do not say things you cannot back up. Licensed means licensed. Insured means insured. A before-and-after photo is of the actual job.

The builder writes from what you tell it and does not invent reviews, numbers or stories. What it cannot do is know whether you are telling it the truth. That claim is yours from the moment you type it.

The advertising rules also care about what you leave out. If a claim only holds with a condition, say the condition in the same breath. The in-app assistant can help you word a claim; it cannot check the claim against the truth.

Privacy, or what you do with a visitor's data

A site collects data through its form and, sometimes, through analytics. Privacy compliance is telling people what you collect and doing only that. Website Builder Studio counts page views on the server with no cookie added. Your own analytics tag loads only after a visitor accepts on sites with a banner.

Your privacy policy is yours. You upload it and it publishes exactly as given. The builder does not write legal pages, so it never puts words in your policy you did not choose.

Web standards, the part a machine can check

Web standards are the published rules for how a page should be built. Valid HTML, one main heading, a title and description, a sitemap, a real not-found status for a missing page. Google Search Essentials is the part Google publishes about what it needs to read a site.

This is the kind of compliance a check can enforce, because it is about structure rather than truth. It is also the kind most sites get wrong quietly, since nothing visibly breaks.

What the builder checks before a page publishes

Every page passes a check that runs before anything publishes. It is validated against Google Search Essentials and modern web standards. A page that fails does not publish, and the in-app assistant says why.

The check covers structure: headings in order, labels on fields, contrast, titles and descriptions, clean addresses, structured data, internal links. A uniqueness check strips city, state and industry names before it measures, so a page is not a copy with the town swapped.

It does not judge whether your claims are true, and it does not read your legal pages. Those are the two things no software should pretend to do.

What stays yours

That list is shorter than it looks, and every item on it is something you already know better than any software. The builder's half is the structure, checked on every save. Your half is the truth, and a genuinely useful page needs both.

• Your terms and privacy policy, uploaded and published exactly as given
• The truth of every claim on the site
• Alt text that honestly describes each image
• Plain words a stranger can follow
• Whether to show a cookie banner, and what it says