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Impressum (legal notice) page missing

German law requires a clearly labelled legal-notice page reachable from every page within two clicks. Missing or hidden Impressum pages are a classic warning-letter target.

What this means in plain English

The blueredix scanner crawled your homepage looking for a link with “Impressum”, “Imprint”, “Legal notice”, or similar text in the link text or URL slug, and didn’t find one. German law (DDG §5, formerly TMG §5) requires every commercial website to publish a clearly labelled, permanently accessible legal-notice page that identifies the operator, gives contact details, and lists several other items. The “easy to find” requirement has been interpreted by the German Federal Court of Justice to mean reachable in at most two clicks from the homepage, and the link must be obvious, not hidden in a sub-menu.

Why it matters

A missing or hidden Impressum is one of the longest-running warning-letter (Abmahnung) targets in German web law. The financial exposure per warning is typically €200 to €1,000, plus a contractual penalty for the next infringement. Repeat-offender penalty clauses can climb into the four- and five-figure range.

Required content under DDG §5 (the act covers most commercial websites, including freelancers, sole traders, and side businesses):

  1. Name and full postal address. No PO boxes; an actual physical address is required.
  2. Phone number and email address. The email is not optional, even if you publish a contact form.
  3. The legal form of the business (GmbH, UG, GbR, Einzelkaufmann, etc.) and, where applicable, the company register and Handelsregister number.
  4. The VAT identification number, if you have one.
  5. For regulated professions (doctors, lawyers, tax advisors, architects, etc.): the issuing chamber, the country of professional licence, and a link to the relevant code of professional conduct.
  6. For media offerings beyond a personal page: a person responsible for content under the Medienstaatsvertrag.

How to fix it

  1. Create a page at a clearly named URL such as /impressum/, /imprint/, or /legal-notice/. The German variants are universally recognised.

  2. Link to it from every page on your site. The conventional place is the footer, in clearly readable text, no smaller than the surrounding copy. Hiding it inside a “Legal” sub-menu is risky; many courts have held that this violates the “easy to find” requirement.

  3. Use a generator if you’re unsure about the exact wording. The eRecht24 Impressum generator is the most-cited tool and updates whenever the law changes. The IHK Impressum generator is also widely used.

  4. Re-check accessibility after publishing. Open every top-level page from your sitemap and confirm that a link to /impressum/ is visible without scrolling on desktop and reachable on mobile.

A note on language

A .de site primarily targeting German-speaking visitors must publish the Impressum in German. A multilingual site should publish a German Impressum and a translated version on the language-specific URLs. The blueredix scanner accepts either label (Impressum or Legal notice) as long as the page is reachable.

Further reading