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If your business promotes goods and services that are addressed solely at the adult audience, you should give an extra thought on who visits your website. Though the matter of age restriction online is a subject of ongoing debate, our suggestion is to view your website as you would your physical store.

Let’s say you are in the artisanal distillery business. Would you feel comfortable having a 12 year old roaming around the place? Or perhaps you are a photography artist who just opened a show of your latest bridal boudoir images. Our bet is, for both situations, you would feel more at ease if any minor visiting your business would be accompanied by an adult. And since you can’t control who reaches your adult-targeted website, the age restriction pop up comes in handy.

3 outcomes of your age restriction pop up

1. Your visitor is too young to read. This, by any mean, doesn’t mean they’re not tech-savvy. They can go from link to link until they reach your child-sensitive website. The age restriction pop up will prevent them to enter your website unless they click the right answer. There’s one in two chances they get it right. If you phrase the question right and link the redirect to a kid-safe website, chances are you successfully guide your potential visitor to another page that is better suited for them, with very little chance they will go back to your page to choose the other option. We’ll come to setting up the pop up later in the article.
2. Your visitor does know how to read and is thought not to lie online. This is the best situation you can hope for. It’s when your visitor has been given guidance either at home or at school as to how to behave both online and offline. This implies that your age restriction pop up will be answered truthfully and the kid will not enter your website, instead they will be redirected to another website.
3. Your visitor read your pop up and decides they will enter regardless. It is an outcome you might encounter and you’ll probably never hear about it. This course of action is beyond your control and there is very little, if anything, to do about it. It will be your choice if you wish to set up your galleries with a disclaimer as the first image, or if you would feel that a disclaimer should serve as the subtitle of your pages. This will be your personal choice and should be considered when it doesn’t interfere with your brand’s overall concept.

Your age restricted website as seen by Google

To see if your website should have an age restriction pop up, you can view Google’s policy on adult content here. This guideline will shed some light as to what is not considered child friendly. One thing to take out of it is that your age restriction will not decrease the rank of your page.

How to set up the age restriction pop up on your website

• In your account, go to the Settings page (gear icon)
• Under Business Type, select one of the four types:
  1. Brewery
  2. Distillery
  3. Specialty Foods
  4. Winery
• Log out of your dashboard and log back in
• Select Settings (gear icon)
• Rollover Extras under the Settings header
• Select Age Verification under Extras 

Setting up the proper pop up

Now that age verification is enabled on your website, you can go ahead and set up the message that will pop up on entry, as well as the redirect link.

First, in the Age Verification tab, you must enable it.

1. Fill in the title – this can be the title of your page or any other message you wish to convey to your visitors.
2. Fill in the prompt question – the answers your visitors will be given are Yes (which allows them to enter your website) and No (which will automatically redirect them to another website of your choice).
3. Add the Under 21 redirect URL – our advice is to send your underage audience to a website that is targeted at them and, at the same time, draw their interest so that they will not return to your page and choose the other answer.
4. Publish your changes to add age restriction to your website. To disable this feature, simply toggle the age verification feature.

When age verification is enabled, your pop up will appear regardless of what link your visitors use to enter your website.

Age verification is just one of the many features that make liveBooks a reliable platform for your business website. Not convinced? Head over to our website and start your free trial today!