Insights · 20 July 2026
The most common compliance mistakes on supplement websites
1. Medicinal claims hiding in plain sight
"Fights infection", "prevents colds", "treats joint pain" — wording like this appears on supplement sites daily, and every instance is a medicinal claim that puts the product in unlicensed-medicine territory. It is the single most serious failure and usually the easiest to find: it tends to be in the biggest font on the page.
2. "Boost" language everywhere
Less catastrophic than medicinal claims but far more common: general efficacy words — boost, supercharge, enhance, strengthen — attached to body systems without any authorised claim behind them. The fix is mapping each product to the register wording its nutrients have earned, then rebuilding the copy around those claims.
3. Copying US websites
American supplement sites operate under a different regime with different permitted language — structure/function claims with an FDA disclaimer have no legal force in the UK. Copying a successful US competitor's product page is one of the most common ways UK brands import unlawful wording wholesale, disclaimer and all.
4. Testimonials doing the dirty work
Brands that keep their own copy clean often let customers make the unlawful claims for them — a review section full of "cured", "healed" and "better than my medication" is still advertising you have chosen to publish. Moderating republished wording is not censorship; it is the same claims rule applied to a different author.
5. Before-and-after imagery and weight-loss promises
Weight-control claims have their own strict rules — claims about the rate or amount of weight loss are not permitted at all — and before/after photos routinely imply exactly that, or a medicinal effect. If a picture makes a claim words could not lawfully make, the picture fails too.
6. Forgetting everywhere that is not the website
The CAP Code follows your marketing wherever it goes: Instagram captions, influencer partners, marketplace listings, email flows. A compliant website undermined by a non-compliant reel is still a compliance problem — which is why our review produces claims guidance the whole marketing operation can reuse, not just clean web copy.
The honest fix
Almost everything above is repairable with a structured audit: map every claim, keep what is authorised, reword what is not, and document the mapping so future campaigns start from safe ground. The brands that get hurt are not the ones with historic mistakes — they are the ones who leave them up until someone else finds them.
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