If your business is selling in the European market and/or targeting EU citizens, you are required to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation, the GDPR.
One of the most important requirements of the GDPR is that if your site uses non-functional cookies, you should show your visitors a Cookie consent banner on the website notifying them about your website’s cookie usage, and you should add a Cookie Policy in which all of the used cookies are explained. You can read more about this aspect here. But what requirements are there to a Cookie consent banner?
The cookie consent banner should at least contain:
- Short info about the cookie usage
- Link to the cookie policy
- Option to either decline or accept cookie usage
Additionally, the Cookie banner should only allow (non-functional) cookies to be placed after the visitor has given consent. Until then, the placing of cookies should be blocked.
All these elements are taken care of when using Complianz | GDPR Cookie Consent, either the Free or Premium version, although you can customize to your needs. If you do this manually, or by using another tool, you can follow the guidelines below to get a good cookie banner.
1. Short info about Cookie usage
In your cookie consent banner, you should add information regarding cookie usage. Is the website using cookies, if so, why? A brief explanation is enough, as long as it’s obvious to website visitors that you would like to place cookies.
Example: “We would like to use cookies to give you the best experience while visiting our website.” Or “For performance purposes we would like to place cookies. Click Accept when you are okay with our request, or Deny when you do not agree”.
2. Link to the Cookie Policy
In your cookie consent banner, you should show a link to your Cookie Policy. In this cookie policy, you should state which cookies are used, why they are used and for how long they will be stored. You can refer to the cookie policy with “Read More” or “Read Our Cookie Policy” or anything similar.
3. Option to Decline or Accept
An option that many website admins forget to implement: The option to decline. In your cookie consent banner you have to give the visitor the option to decline cookie placement. It is not even allowed to place (non-functional) cookies without consent! By default, no cookies should be placed, only after explicit consent is given.
Buttons can be named “Accept” and “Deny” for example, or “Yes” / “No”. As long as it’s obvious that cookies can be rejected and accepted.
4. Block cookies until consent is given
This is something that is conveniently forgotten in most cookie banner tools. In WordPress, this can be a bit complex as there are many plugins, which all place cookies. You’ll have to integrate your cookie placing scripts with your cookie banner to make sure this works in a GDPR compliant way. If you use Complianz GDPR we have made this very easy by integrating this completely in the plugin, and shipping a list of third-party services which should get blocked, like YouTube, Facebook, Vimeo, etcetera.
