5 Best Cookie Consent Plugins for WordPress
In the past, website owners had the right to collect all sorts of user data without site visitors even being aware of it. Nowadays, however, with the increased need for users to have their personal data protected, governments across the world have begun responding to their demands by presenting different data and privacy laws. These laws also include the now well-known GDPR law (the General Data Protection Regulation that protects the data of the EU citizens) and the CCPA, or the California Consumer Privacy Act (similar to GDPR, only for the Californian citizens), among others.
Among different rules and regulations these and other data and privacy laws consist of, one of the things most of them have in common is the requirement of acquiring cookie consent from users. Therefore, to comply with CCPA, GDPR, and other similar laws, it’s important that you implement proper cookie consent notices into your site. And if you own a WordPress site, probably the easiest way to do so is to install the appropriate cookie consent WordPress plugin.
So in this article, we plan to talk more about what cookie consent stands for and why you need to comply with it in the first place. We will also present you with some of the best cookie consent plugins you can use to effectively enable cookie consent notice on your WordPress site, so make sure to stick around and read about:
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Cookie consent notices are popups that appear once users click on your website, letting them know that your website uses cookies. Now, while it’s not illegal to use cookies and have them added to user browsers, these cookie identifiers contain various user data, including their username, location info, password, the type of device they’re using, and so on. According to the laws such as GDPR and CCPA, this means you need to at least give users the option to decline cookies.
Apart from implementing a cookie consent notice on your site, you also need to notify users what you will use cookies for. In addition, you should provide them with a link that will let them opt out if they don’t want you to obtain cookie-specific information about them. This is exactly where cookie consent WordPress plugins come into the picture.
The way these plugins work is that they let you display cookie consent notices once visitors enter your site. Often, they allow users to choose whether they want to accept cookies entirely, partially, or refuse to accept them altogether. Also, most of these cookie consent plugins will help you easily create and add consent notices to your site while also letting you display other cookie consent-related information to users.
Without further ado, here are some of the best plugins in this category.
With over a million active installations on WordPress.org, CookieYes is easily the most popular free plugin you can use to enable a WordPress cookie notice and make your website GRPR compliant. Aside from the GDPR law, the plugin is also compliant with the CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act), Brazil’s LGPD, and France’s CNIL. The plugin works by enabling a cookie notice offering Accept and Reject options. It also allows you to use a shortcode to display the list of cookies on the cookie policy page. In addition, the plugin will let you insert a cookie banner into the website header or footer. If you want, you will be able to easily customize the style of your cookie notice in accordance with your site design. This includes setting the colors, fonts, cookie position, etc.
Some of the other features you get with the CookieYes plugin include the ability to make the notice bar disappear after a couple of seconds (or allow users to accept on scroll) and use a Cookie Audit module to display the cookies used on your site in a table on the Privacy & Policy page. Last but not least, CookieYes can be fully integrated with the WPML translation plugin, allowing you to translate your cookie consent notice to other languages with the utmost ease.
If you want, you can also upgrade to the premium version of CookieYes (available at the price of $69 for a single site) and get access to features like the location-based exclusion of cookie notice for countries in the EU, the ability to export and import cookies and related cookie information via a CSV file, use the cookie banner preview in admin settings, and plenty more.
Cookie Notice is another highly popular plugin that has over a million installs on wp.org. It offers a simple and customizable banner you can use to add cookie consent notices and comply with both GDPR and CCPA regulations. It comes with automated compliance features and allows you to add a customizable notice message and display consent notice to users on click, scroll, or close. On top of that, it provides a link to a Privacy Policy page and gives you access to three different buttons so they can accept some, all, or no cookies (these are called Data Access Levels). The Consent Duration Selector feature will allow your visitors control regarding how long their consent will be valid. Your users will also be able to customize consent by category, and you will have access to the consent metric that will display the visitor’s consent record. Moreover, the Customizable Privacy Paper feature will contain information that will get visitors familiarized with the data sharing risks and benefits.
What’s also great about the Cookie Notice plugin is that you will be able to use the consent analytics dashboard and view a “trust score” to track the way visitors are setting their consent. Finally, you will have access to multilingual support and multidomain management (so that you can manage multiple domains at once and customize different consent banners for every domain).
The Cookie Compliance plugin supports all current (and future) regulations, including GDPR, PECR (UK), ePrivacy Directive (EU), LGPD (Brazil), CCPA, PDPB (India), and more.
Complianz is another GDPR and CCPA-compliant plugin that allows you to add a cookie consent notice to your site as well as a customized cookie policy. You will be able to easily configure a cookie notice to adjust it to your particular region. This includes the EU, UK, US, Australia, South Africa, Canada, and Brazil. Alternatively, you can simply use a single worldwide cookie notice. In addition, you will be able to configure specific cookie consent according to a subregion (eg. USA+CCPA), use custom CSS and customizable templates to create and add cookie consent and conditional cookie notice, use different banner templates, etc.
There are also great consent management features that will allow you to block third-party cookies like Google Maps, Facebook, and Instagram, automatically detect if you need a cookie notice, and more.
Some of the laws the plugin supports include GDPR, CCPA, ePrivacy, DSGVO, TTDSG, LGPD, POPIA, and PIPEDA.
Here is yet another powerful and easy-to-use plugin that will allow you to customize your cookie consent notice and make your website fully GDPR and CCPA cookie compliant. If you use the GDPR Cookie Compliance plugin, you will be able to easily change all the text and upload your own logo, set colors, fonts, and the position of your cookie consent banner (at the top or bottom of the page). Moreover, you can choose whether scripts will be loaded by default or when users give their consent, include Accept and Reject buttons, add a link to a Privacy Policy page, pick from two different layouts, use different animations (to take the user experience of your visitors to another level), and the list goes on.
You can upgrade to the premium version of the plugin for more advanced features (starting at £49 for one site license). These include the cookie wall or fullscreen layout which serves to display the cookie consent banner in fullscreen mode so that users have to accept or reject cookies before they see the rest of the page. There’s also the ability to easily export and import your settings, and to allow users to accept cookies by scrolling or by setting a timer. You can also ask users to renew consent if there is a change in privacy, use geolocation (to show the cookie consent banner to visitors from selected countries only), etc.
WordPress Real Cookie Banner will allow you to implement cookie banners into your WordPress site with complete ease and also fully manage cookie consent according to GDPR and ePrivacy laws.
What’s great about this plugin is that it also includes a Content Blocker feature, which means your themes, plugins, etc. will only load scripts, styles, and content that transfer personal data by users after their consent is obtained. You will also be able to easily adjust the design of your cookie banner according to your personal preferences. This includes setting different colors and text, adding effects, and more. And the best thing about all this is that you will be able to see all your changes live.
Some of the other features include the easy-to-follow step-by-step guide, the ability to propose the changing or revoking of consent using simple shortcodes, offer youth protection, automatically accept bot cookies (to get more visibility in SERPs), and more.
You can also upgrade to the premium version of the plugin to get access to additional features like more than 20 banner design presets, geo-restriction to decide whether to display banners in specific countries (or not), view how consent was obtained using an interactive visualization of the cookie banner (or content blocker), and the list goes on.
The pricing of the premium version of Real Cookie Banner starts at €49 per year (for a single site license).
Wrapping Things Up
If you install one of the available cookie consent WordPress plugins on your site, you can easily comply with different privacy laws such as GDPR, CCPA, and many others. By doing so, you will ensure that you’re keeping the best interests of your visitors in mind and allow them to decide whether you will be able to gather their data when using cookies or not.
If you ask us, we recommend going for plugins like CookieYes or Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR/CCPA, since both of them come with a plethora of useful features and allow your WordPress site to stay up to date with most of the relevant and latest privacy and data laws. That being said, we firmly believe you won’t go wrong if you decide to use any other plugin on this list as long as it offers the support for the laws your site needs to be compliant with. Either way, you can rest assured that you will be able to add fully functional cookie consent notices to your WordPress site quickly and with the utmost ease.
