When you browse online for something specific, like a new coffee maker or a vacation spot, you suddenly start seeing ads for that exact thing everywhere you go on the internet?

That’s tracking cookies at work. I first encountered them while building my first business website, and like many of you, I found them both fascinating and slightly concerning.

If you’re a regular internet user or a small business owner with a WordPress site, understanding tracking cookies isn’t just about curiosity, it’s essential for managing your own online privacy and respecting the privacy of your website visitors.

In this article, I’ll show you what are tracking cookies and how to manage them in WordPress.

What is a Tracking Cookie?

You might have heard of cookies before in the context of websites remembering you. Standard website cookies are small text files that websites store in your browser.

They do helpful things like performing important website functions, keeping you logged in, remembering what’s in your shopping cart, or recalling your language preference. These are often called essential cookies because they’re set by the website you are actively visiting.

Tracking cookies are a specific type with a different purpose. They follow your behavior not just on one website, but across multiple websites over time. The most common type of tracking cookie is the third-party cookie set by third party services on that site. Think of things like:

• Advertisements served by an ad network such as Google Ads
• Social media platforms adding pixels
• Embedded videos or other content from external platforms
• Website analytics services like Google Analytics

Why Are Tracking Cookies Used?

From the perspective of businesses and advertisers, tracking cookies offer several benefits, such as:

• Targeted Advertising: Advertisers can show ads to people who are most likely to be interested based on their past browsing behavior.
• Website Analytics: Companies like Google Analytics use cookies to understand how people navigate and behave on your site, which pages they visit, and where they come from. Third-party analytics services also use cookies to track behavior across different client websites.
• Content Personalization: Sometimes, tracking data might be used to tailor the content you see on a site or recommend products based on your browsing history.

That said, let’s see what privacy concerns are caused by tracking cookies.

Privacy Concerns Regarding Tracking Cookies

While there are business benefits, tracking cookies raise significant concerns for users.

The main worry is the sheer amount of data collected about a user’s online life. This includes their interests, habits, political leanings, health concerns, and other information. This data collection often happens without your explicit awareness or understanding.

That’s why different privacy laws regulate the use of tracking cookies and make the process more transparent.

GDPR and Tracking Cookies

If your website has visitors from the European Union (EU), then General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) applies. A key requirement is obtaining explicit, informed consent before placing non-essential cookies, like tracking cookies, on a user’s device.

Simply having a banner that says ‘By continuing, you accept cookies’ is generally not compliant. Users must have a clear choice to accept or reject different categories of cookies.

CCPA and Tracking Cookies

For websites with visitors from California, the CCPA grants specific rights regarding their personal information.

This includes the right to know what personal information is being collected (which can include data linked via tracking cookies) and the right to opt-out of the ‘sale’ of that information.

Besides that, there are several other privacy laws like LGPD of Brazil, PIPEDA of Canada, and PIPL of China require user consent before you can enable tracking cookies on a user’s device or browser.

Now, let’s see how you can easily manage tracking cookies in WordPress.

Managing Tracking Cookies in WordPress

The easiest way to manage cookies in WordPress is by using WPConsent. It is the best cookie management plugin for WordPress that’s beginner-friendly and offers powerful features.

WPConsent automatically scans your website for cookies and blocks third-party scripts from loading prior to receiving user’s consent.

What this means is that the plugin will look for services that add cookies to your website. Once it scans and identifies them, it will block their scripts that add cookies to a user’s browser until the visitor gives consent. 

For instance, it recognizes scripts from popular services like Google Analytics, Matomo, Google Ads, Facebook Pixel, LinkedIn Insight, Snapchat pixel, TikTok pixel, and more.

Next, you can simply check the option for ‘Prevent known scripts from adding cookies before consent is given’ and the tracking cookies will only load when a user gives consent.

WPConsent also lets you see the cookie data inside your WordPress dashboard. It will show details of all the cookies along with their name, ID, description, and duration. Plus, you can edit the details of each cookie and delete them.

To learn more, please see our detailed guide on how to block third party cookies in WordPress.

Besides that, you can also create a fully customizable cookie banner for your website using WPConsent. It comes with pre-built banner templates and multiple customization options.

You can edit the style and layout of the banner, change the text, edit the buttons that will appear on the banner, and much more.

For more details, you can follow our guide on how to add a cookie consent banner on your WordPress site.

Lastly, WPConsent also lets you manage consent logs with ease. You can quickly view cookie consent data from your visitors, along with the IP address, which cookies were accepted and declined, and the date.

With WPConsent, you also get a lot more powerful features like content blocking for popular video sites like YouTube, Vimeo, and Dailymotion. What this feature does is that it will prevent embedded videos from playing before a user gives consent.

Other than that, you can also show and edit banner text, change preferences panel content, and other in-plugin settings in different languages.

This makes WPConsent a complete solution for managing tracking cookies with ease in WordPress.

I hope this article helped you learn what are tracking cookies and how to handle them in WordPress. You may also want to see our guide on how to manage cookie consent data in WordPress.

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