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Trust Page watermarks 

Trust Page editors on paid Trust Exchange accounts can use our watermark feature to apply a watermark to PDFs on your Trust Page(s).

  • Watermarks are applied to PDFs that are 32MB or smaller, they are not added to other document types on your Trust Pages.
  • The watermark is added on download, and is comprised of: the downloader’s name, email, and the date and time of the download.

Enable Watermark PDFs

Watermark PDFs is a global setting for your Trust Center (it cannot be controlled separately for individual Trust Pages).

  1. Click the Trust Exchange icon from UpGuard’s left-hand navigation.
  2. Click Trust Center.
  3. Click Settings.
  4. Toggle on Watermark PDFs (or toggle it off to turn off watermarks).

PDFs downloaded (from this point forward) from any of your Trust Pages will now have a watermark applied. You can turn off watermark PDFs at any point, and from that point forward, PDFs will not have a watermark applied. 

Preview the watermark 

The watermark setting must be enabled before you can preview it. 

  1. Click the Trust Exchange icon from UpGuard’s left-hand navigation.
  2. Select a Trust Page with a PDF. 
  3. Scroll to the Documents section. 
  4. Click the vertical ellipsis on a PDF document’s row.
  5. Select Download. 

Exceptions and troubleshooting

There are cases where the watermark cannot be applied to a PDF. Commonly, this includes problems like:

  • Existing protections (e.g. password protection, signature protection, etc)
  • Corrupt files 
  • Parsing errors

The following instructions contain more information on these common error types and recommended steps to resolve the problem. In all cases, you have the choice to either leave the file as-is in your Trust Page (without the watermark) or replace it with a version that can be watermarked successfully. 

Error type: PDF is password protected


If a PDF is protected with a password, our watermarking feature can’t even read or modify it. To resolve this issue, upload a version of the PDF without the password protection in place.

Error type: PDF has a signature which is protected by a certificate

PDF documents which have a certificate signature in place will invalidate the signature if the file is altered. This is not compatible with our watermark feature, as it leads to an error when opened by the downloader, warning the user that the document has been tampered with.

Note the Signatures panel at the top of the document and see how it shows an error for the watermarked document.

To resolve this issue, disable the certificate before uploading a new version. 

Error type: File is not in PDF format

While you can store a variety of file types in your Trust Page, the watermark feature is only available for PDF files. Files with an incorrect “.pdf” extension will show this error. 

Error type: Unknown parse error

This error means that we are unable to parse the document. Usually this means that there is a defect in the document itself. Most modern PDF readers are able to work around the defects and render the document regardless. To troubleshoot this defect, resolve any errors in the file itself, and try exporting a new version of the PDF.