§Legal

In Germany, a legal notice (Impressum) and a privacy notice are mandatory for every business website. If they are missing, you risk formal warnings (Abmahnungen) — here they are created automatically.

You fill in a form: legal form, address, authorised representatives, register and tax number. The finished legal texts are generated from these details.

“Business” is defined more broadly than many people think: an association, a blog with advertising and a site that only provides information but is run on a permanent basis all fall under it.

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Whatever you leave blank remains as a visible gap in the text — nothing is invented.

That is intentional, and the reason is sobering: invented company details in a legal notice go unnoticed until it is too late. A visible gap, by contrast, is noticed straight away — by you, when proofreading.

So fill everything in before you publish.

No. If you later activate forms, newsletters or donations, the privacy notice adds the appropriate sections. You do not need to add anything.

This is one of the few points where a system can genuinely take this work off your hands — because it knows what is switched on and does not have to guess.

This is where you define what visitors are asked on their first visit.

The rule of thumb: the less you track, the leaner the notice can be. A site without audience measurement and without embedded third-party services needs no consent request — technically necessary cookies do not require consent.

Conversely: every third-party service you build in makes the notice bigger and the site more unpleasant. That is a good reason to be sparing.

Every service that your published page loads from someone else’s server transmits the visitor’s IP address to that server — without asking, as soon as the page is opened.

Mainly affected are: fonts, maps, videos, analytics services and icon libraries.

That is why Aurora Hive Sites serves the fonts and icons it uses itself. If you build something in yourself, check whether it can be served locally — that spares you the consent request and spares the visitor the data transfer.

For donation receipts, the Donations area requires complete details from the Legal area: tax number, exemption notice (Freistellungsbescheid), purpose as laid down in the statutes.

If any of this is missing, the receipt is invalid. As a rule, this only comes to light when a donor submits it to the tax office — in other words, at the worst possible moment.

No. They are carefully generated drafts based on your details and on what your site actually does, and therefore considerably better than a template from the internet that belongs to a different website.

But they do not replace a review of the individual case. If your site does something unusual — shop, bookings, reviews, data from abroad — have someone look over it.

You as the operator — even if an agency built the site, and even if texts were machine-generated.

In practice, this means: whatever is on your site should be read before it goes online. Especially prices, promises, deadlines and anything that matters legally.

That is also why nothing is published automatically in these programs: everything remains a draft until you publish.

Yes. The obligation is linked to the site being run on a business-like basis, not to an intention to make a profit — an association’s website that is run on a permanent basis falls under it.

It must contain: name of the association, address, authorised representatives, register court and register number, plus a way to get in touch. If you are liable for VAT, the VAT ID is added.

Three things that tend to come along unnoticed during an import:

1. Images without cleared rights — the most common costly find.
2. Outdated legal texts from a time when different rules applied. Use the newly generated ones instead of the imported ones.
3. References to services that no longer exist, or to third-party servers that transmit data without asking.

Everything imported arrives as a draft — use this state to tidy up before you publish.

When dealing with consumers, prices must be final prices — including VAT and all components — and for services, this includes anything charged in addition (travel, materials).

Keep them up to date. An outdated price on the website is more annoying than none at all, because it creates an expectation you then have to disappoint in conversation.

If prices change frequently, “from” with a date (“As of: January 2026”) is more honest than a fixed figure.

What is mandatory is an email address and a means of quick electronic contact. A phone number is not mandatory in every case, but it is usual and expected — and in practice it is the reason someone calls instead of clicking away.

What applies in every case: the channels given must actually be reachable. An address nobody reads does not fulfil the obligation.