You are required to have a Cookie Policy notice on your website unless your website exclusively targets non-EU audiences. For further information on which businesses have to comply, please click here.

What content should a Cookie Policy notice consist of?
The content required for a Cookie Policy notice will vary from one business to another. Some of the content might appear similar across a variety of websites. For example, information about what cookie files are and the law regarding them. However, you are also required to provide information about the cookie files that your website uses. This includes cookie files placed by third parties and information on how website visitors can change their cookie file preferences.

Providing information about the cookie files placed by third parties is not easy to maintain. Whenever a third party releases an update for their code, you would need to re-check the cookie files used by their code. You may need to update your Cookie Policy to reflect their changes.

We’ve decided that using Cookie Bot is the most practical solution. This online service automatically scans your website for any cookie files being used and automatically updates your Cookie Policy based on the results. In addition to this, the auto-generated Cookie Policy also provides links for the user to change or withdraw their consent and keeps a record of their choices, without any interaction with yourself. If your website has less than 100 subpages, you can use this service for free. For additional pricing options, please click here.

For further information on Cookie Policies, please click here.

Additional Information
As well as displaying a notice to new visitors informing them of your Cookie Policy, we would also recommend having this information on a Cookie Policy page. This is an ideal place to provide additional information, along with the option for visitors to either change or withdraw their consent.

What other options are available to me?
It’s worth mentioning that there’s a good chance your website will have more than 100 subpages, especially if you have a news/blog section on your website. Our website had a combination of 83 posts and pages. However, due to WordPress generating a page for other items, such as user profiles and categories, this pushed us over the 100-page threshold for a free account.

Paying £8/month for a service that most people simply click OK to when visiting your website and then never give a second thought, is as frustrating to us, as it probably is to you. However, manually checking the cookie files stored on your website, on a frequent basis, is easily going to cost more than £8/month in either your time or ours.

If you did opt for a more manual process and created a way for users to change or withdraw their consent; manually processing these requests on a busy website, could potentially waste even more of your time, not to mention recording the choices of every visitor.

Based on our research into other options, if you are serious about being compliant, unfortunately, Cookie Bot really is the most efficient option.