I don’t like cookie banners, but who really does, right? On this blog, I’ve removed everything that would need any “consent management tool” and switched to either cookieless solutions or two-click options. More on that in the following blog posts.

But on some site, you do need a consent tool. Then you have the option to choose between a wide range of different tools, both free and premium. Many large sites even use complete external services, that might not even come in the form of a WordPress plugin. Some solutions that are WordPress plugins are either exclusively premium or offer a free version, that is so limited, that it can’t really be used. This is where I’ve found the Complianz plugin as one that is indeed usable in its free version.

What does Complianz do?

Well, it’s a cookie consent banner, so it tries to help you to have your site only set cookies, when they are either necessary or consent was given to set them. It can also block external embed, like videos from YouTube, Vimeo and other streaming portals or embeds of Google Maps, Twitter, Instagram, and so on. It also records the consent given, to comply with regulations like the GDPR.

It offers a “cookie scanner” that runs on your blog, and not through a (paid) external service, trying to find all the cookies your site is setting. You can then put those cookies in different categories or add custom ones. It also creates a dynamic “Cookie Policy” page listing all the cookies in the different categories.

There is also a premium version of the plugin that offers more advanced things like statistics, A/B testing, geo IP consent, more documents, and more. But for a simple website that only cares about allowing visitors to accept certain cookies, those features are not really necessary in my opinion.

Why do I use Complianz?

From all the different cookie consent plugins I have tested, this one serves my needs best in the free version. If I don’t have a budget for premium solutions, Complianz is the plugin I would use. If I need to use one of these solutions in the first place.

Conclusion

If I can decide on the services used on a website, I would always try to chose only those, who are privacy-friendly and not set any cookies or load external data. But if I do have to use such services, I will use a plugin like Complianz, that is free and runs on the website itself, and not a paid external service, to implement a cookie consent banner.