How To Add Cookie Notice In WordPress

Cookie compliance is a critical part of all websites that want to keep their visitors happy and comply with the GDPR. One of the ways to stay compliant is to add a cookie consent banner or a cookie consent pop-up. Though this does not alone make sure you are GDPR compliant, it will help you get towards that goal. In this article, we’ll show you how to set up a cookie consent popup/banner for your WordPress site.

What are cookies?

Everyone knows cookies are delicious but did you know they are also used to track your online behavior? Cookies are little files that download on your computer, phone, or tablet each time you visit a website. They collect information about the sites you visit, the web browser and device you use, and even your online search behavior. This information can be used for targeted advertisements and other data-collecting techniques.

To get started we are going to need to download and activate the GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin (CCPA Ready) by WebToffee to set up the cookie consent popup/banner. So head on to your “Plugins” > “Add new” and search for “GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin (CCPA Ready)”.

You can get started with either the free version or get the premium version (which we recommend) to get some premium features like automatic cookie scan, automatic script blocking, more positions and premade templates to choose from, and geolocation rules to not show the banner when it’s not necessary. The premium plugin comes with 1 year of ticketed support.

Settings

The first thing you should do when you open up the GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin is to head on to its general settings. Here you can select the type of law you want to follow might it be just GDPR, CCPA, or both.

To comply with GDPR we highly recommend not hiding the bar after a delay so you can collect explicit consent.

Cookie bar settings

To customize the bar look you can head on to the “Customise Cookie Bar” where you can edit the colors and placement of the consent form. You can either turn it into a popup or a banner depending on what you wish.

Customize Buttons

Here you can also edit all the buttons from “Accept All Button” to “Read more“. You can change the color, spelling, and if they are shown as buttons or links. You also find the shortcodes for each button if you happen to lose them for some reason.

Cookie bar customisation

Cookies list

The cookies list includes all the cookies you might have on your site. You can manually add them here or if you use the scanner it can be populated automatically. In the free version, you can scan up to 100 URLs for cookies or if you are using the premium version you can scan up to 2 000 URLs for different cookies and automatically add them here.

Cookies list

When adding a cookie its important to add the following information:

  • Cookie name – The name of the cookie
  • Type – Advertising / Analytics / Functional etc. to inform users what type of cookie it is
  • Duration – How long the cookie is active
  • Sensitivity – Tells if the cookie is required for the website to work perfectly or not
  • ID – Usually same as the name or some other identification string
  • Description – Detailed description of what the cookie does
Adding new cookie to list

Each cookie belongs in a category. Categories are shown to users who might want to turn off certain cookies by category. For example, a user might not want to have any cookies related to advertising to be saved on their device or they might want to disable cookies related to analytics.

Here you can create and edit the category descriptions. We recommend creating these before adding new cookies to ensure you have all the categories you need at hand when adding the cookies to them or else you might need to jump around settings.

Cookie categories

Policy generator

Another awesome feature of the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin is the “Policy generator“. It allows you to generate cookie policies quickly and easily. Simply generate, copy and paste to your page where you want the text to be shown, or use the “Create cookie policy page” button to create the page and policy in one go.

Script blocker

GDPR Cookie Consent plugin is able to block certain scripts automatically that other plugins might generate. If you wish to turn the blocking on or off you can do that from here. Though please note that not all plugins are supported by this feature so you still might need to do some work by hand.

Script blocking

Privacy Overview

To edit the main text shown on the privacy overview when user wants to edit the cookie categories they will allow, head on to the privacy overview setting.

After you are done editing your cookie consent you can check it out on your page. By default, all categories are “Disabled” and activated only after the user presses the “Accept All” button. This can be changed in the settings but is not encouraged since it might break the GDPR or other privacy laws in your country.

Here’s what the cookie consent looks like as a popup:

If the users want to edit their cookie settings they will be shown each category and what cookies each category holds so they can decide which of the categories they might want to activate or keep disabled.

Conclusion

In conclusion, adding a cookie consent to your site is one of the most important features. GDPR and CCPA are no laughing matter and as a website owner, you should try to follow them to the letter as well as you possibly can. Creating and keeping up with all the cookies on your page might be a huge hassle so we highly encourage everyone to purchase the GDPR Cookie Consent’s paid premium version to help you automate the cookie scanning and other features. Even though it does not automatically make you GDPR compliant since GDPR has much more inside of it than just cookies, it will help you towards that goal and will take some of the pain of doing everything by hand away.

FAQ

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy Directive (ePR) require you as a website owner to obtain cookie consents from your visitors from the EU. This is to protect users from tracking they have not consented to.

Yes, the base plugin is free, but we highly recommend getting the premium version of the plugin since it helps you automate some of the more tedious parts of staying up to code with GDPR and CCPA.

You can scan up to 100 URLs with the free version and up to 2 000 URLs with the premium version.

This feature is only available in the premium version of the plugin. You can purchase the premium version by clicking here.

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