The Privacy Suite for WordPress

Is a cookie consent banner required?

Get compliant today in the European Union, United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Australia & South Africa with the only Privacy Suite for WordPress that offers a fully-featured plugin for Worldwide Compliance.

We’ve been receiving many questions regarding the Cookie Consent Banner & the GDPR. Are you obligated to implement it into your website in the GDPR or are there exceptions? We will explain this in this article.

What are the different types of cookies?

We have written some articles concerning this topic, but it is still good to know before answering the main question. There are three kinds of cookies:

Functional Cookies
Analytical Cookies
Advertising or Marketing Cookies

Functional Cookies

Functional cookies are cookies that make a website perform better. Functional cookies are e.g.:

Read more about Functional cookies here: What are Functional Cookies?

Analytical Cookies

Analytical cookies keep track of which pages you visit on the website, how long you view a certain page, which page you visit afterwards, and so on. Webmasters can then view this information in their statistics program (e.g. Google Analytics) and use it to improve their website.

Read more about Analytical cookies here: What are Analytical Cookies?

Advertising or Marketing Cookies

You do not need to ask permission for the previous cookies in accordance with the GDPR. However, there are also many websites that use so-called advertising or tracking cookies; cookies that track which websites you visit and which pages or products you view there. This information is then used for advertising purposes.

Read more about Advertising/Marketing cookies here: What are Marketing Cookies?

Asking consent

When you are using advertising cookies on your website, you should always ask for the consent of users on your website. You are not allowed to place these cookies without the explicit consent of the user in the GDPR law. When you are only using Functional cookies, you don’t have to ask for consent or show a cookie consent banner. When using Analytical cookies, you should ask for consent when you don’t anonymize IP addresses (refer to this article on how to Anonymize IP addresses in Google Analytics).

When using Advertising or Tracking cookies you should always explicitly ask for consent from the user. Please also note that you can never place cookies before the consent has been given!

Do you need a Cookie Consent Banner?

When you are using cookies that store you always have to explicitly ask consent from the user. When you anonymize every single bit of data you don’t have to (in most regions). Functional cookies don’t require the consent of the user as they are only placed for performance purposes.

Our plugin decides whether a cookie consent banner has to be shown. So you shouldn’t need to worry when using our plugin.