What a Website in Portugal Legally Needs: the Complete Checklist

This is the page we wish we could have handed over the first time someone asked us «is my website legal?». The obligations are scattered across half a dozen statutes, each with its own guide — here is the full map, organised the useful way: by the type of site you have. Each point links to our detailed guide where one exists.

The usual caveat, doubly important on a page like this: a practical guide from people who build websites, not legal advice. Laws change; confirm sensitive details with your adviser. If you are a foreign founder operating in Portugal, several of these duties will be new to you — they are real, and they are inspected.

Level 1 — Every business website

1. Identifying who is behind the site. E-commerce law requires an online provider to make accessible its name or company name, address, email and, where applicable, tax number and registry details. Commercial companies must also state their firm, registered office and registration data in their external communications. In practice: a complete "Contacts" page or footer solves it — and conveys the trust the law is ultimately asking for.

2. The electronic complaints-book link. If you supply goods or services to the public, your site must display, visibly, access to the official platform. It is the most-failed and easiest-to-inspect duty there is — the full guide, with the approved logos and the fines, is here.

3. The ADR notice. Information on the Alternative Dispute Resolution bodies the consumer can turn to — the footer paragraph nearly everyone copies badly from someone else's site. Explained in the same guide as the complaints book.

4. GDPR and cookies. If the site has a form, a newsletter or visit statistics, it processes personal data: you need a genuine privacy policy (not a copied text carrying another company's name — we see this weekly), a legal basis for each use, and properly managed consent for non-essential cookies. Our GDPR and cookies guide for SMEs is here.

5. Terms of use. Not legally mandatory for a brochure site, but they cost little and save arguments — and for an online store they stop being optional in practice (see level 3).

Level 2 — Depending on size and sector

6. Digital accessibility. Since 28 June 2025, the European accessibility regime applies to services such as e-commerce — with an exemption for service-providing micro-enterprises (fewer than 10 employees and up to €2M turnover). If you are near the thresholds, or sell to covered companies, read the guide on who is obliged and to what.

7. Sector rules. Regulated sectors (health, financial activities, local accommodation with its registration number, real-estate mediation with the AMI licence…) carry their own information duties on their sites. If your activity has a licence or registration number, the website is one of the places it must appear.

Level 3 — Online stores (everything above, plus this)

8. Pre-contractual information and the right of withdrawal. In distance sales to consumers you must clearly state the characteristics, the total price (taxes and shipping included), payment methods, delivery times — and the 14-day right of withdrawal, with its form. Returns policies are not a courtesy: they are an obligation with a prescribed shape.

9. Certified invoicing. The platform's automatic receipt is not an invoice — issuing through AT-certified software, with ATCUD and QR code, has its own guide.

10. Payments and security. HTTPS across the whole site (a given by now — its absence is an alarm signal to customers and to Google) and payments through reputable providers, as detailed in our store-building guide.

The condensed checklist

• Complete identification (name, address, email, tax number) accessible
• Visible «Livro de Reclamações» link pointing at the official platform
• ADR block naming the competent body
• Genuine privacy policy + compliant cookie management
• Terms of use (mandatory in practice for stores)
• Accessibility: you know which group you are in (covered / exempt / out of scope)
• Sector licences and registrations visible, where they exist
• Stores: pre-contractual info, 14-day withdrawal, certified invoicing, HTTPS

A pattern you may have noticed in this list: almost none of it is "legal work" — it is website-building work done right the first time. The right footer, the right pages, the right forms. That is why, on the sites we deliver, compliance is part of the delivery, verified in our launch checklist — not a scare for next year.

If you read the list and counted three or four gaps on your current site, you are not alone — that is the average of what we find. Describe your site in our estimate form and we will tell you what it costs to put everything in order: a concrete figure, no sales calls, no alarmism.