Every visitor who accepts your cookie banner adds one more row to a table nobody’s watching. Six months in, that table is thousands of rows deep. A year in, deleting from it starts to hurt.

I heard exactly that from a WPConsent user.

They’d built their own workaround to purge old consent logs, and it kept timing out as the table grew. It shouldn’t take custom code to clean up your consent logs.

Today, WPConsent 1.1.8 adds automatic consent log cleanup.

Set a retention window once, and old logs clear out on their own every week. Nothing to remember or run by hand. It’s off by default, so nothing changes unless you turn it on.

The rest of the release follows the same idea: making WPConsent more accurate about what it stores, reports, and shows.

What WPConsent reports to other consent plugins. The wording publishers see under the IAB framework. And two fixes that make WPConsent behave more as you configured it to.

What’s in WPConsent 1.1.8

Here’s what changed:

• Automatic Consent Logs Cleanup: A retention window that trims old logs weekly, without you lifting a finger.
• WP Consent API reporting: WPConsent now tells other plugins whether your banner is opt-in or opt-out, plus each visitor’s per-service choices.
• IAB standard wording for Features: TCF Policy v5.0.b calls for IAB’s standard Features text. Sites running the framework now use it automatically.
• Two fixes worth knowing about: Location-based rules behind a proxy, and scripts that stayed blocked after consent.

We’ll walk through each one, starting with the one that started this whole release.

Automatic Consent Logs Cleanup

Consent logs exist so you can prove, later, that someone actually agreed to your cookie banner. That’s the point. Nobody goes back and reads a log from 14 months ago, though.

WPConsent now lets you set how long logs stick around, from 3 months to 2 years. It clears out anything older on its own every week.

I tested this myself.

I seeded a test site with 100 consent log entries spread across five years of dates, then turned cleanup on. The setting sits right under “Consent Logs” on the Settings tab. Flip it on and a retention picker appears.

Here’s the part we were most careful about. Deleting a consent log is permanent.

There’s no backup, no undo. So before anything gets deleted, WPConsent asks you to confirm, and tells you roughly how many logs the next run will actually remove.

Those 90 logs weren’t a placeholder.

It was the real count for my test data at a 3-month window. Your dashboard will show your own number, calculated fresh each time you change the setting.

I confirmed it. On the very next page load, WordPress’s own cron quietly did its job. 90 logs gone, 10 left, exactly as promised.

This is a data minimization habit made automatic.

How long to keep consent logs depends on your own policies and requirements. WPConsent simply gives you the tools to automate whatever retention window you choose.

⚠️ Automatic Cleanup is focused on one job: managing your consent logs. It doesn’t change or optimize anything else in your database.

✅ Here’s what happens on a site with years of old consent logs: WPConsent deletes up to 1,000 records per run, with each cleanup job capped at 20 seconds. If there’s more to remove, it simply picks up where it left off the next time it runs until the backlog is gone.

Other Plugins Now Read Your Banner Correctly

WPConsent integrated with the WP Consent API, the shared standard other plugins use to check whether a visitor consented to something.

In 1.1.8, that integration goes further.

WPConsent now tells those plugins whether your banner runs opt-in or opt-out. They match your setup instead of falling back to their own defaults.

Turn on per-service toggles, and each visitor’s accept or deny for a specific service gets reported too. A plugin can check one service by name now, instead of an entire category.

There’s nothing to set up.

Update WPConsent, and plugins that use the WP Consent API automatically get the extra information they need.

IAB Asked for This Wording. It’s Already In.

IAB updated its TCF policy.

Version 5.0.b calls for a specific, standardized description of Features in your preferences modal.

WPConsent 1.1.8 adopts that standard text. It reads straight from the vendor list your site already fetches.

I enabled TCF on a test site and opened the preferences modal myself. The text above is what loaded, pulled live from the vendor list.

IAB only started shipping this text in the vendor list in July 2026. Web CMPs have until October 2026 to adopt it. WPConsent shipped it the same month it became available.

Because it comes straight from the vendor list, it arrives already translated in whatever languages IAB provides.

It updates itself whenever IAB revises the wording. If your cached vendor list hasn’t refreshed yet, WPConsent falls back to the previous text until it does.

This addresses one specific TCF policy requirement.

It keeps the wording in your Features section aligned with the official IAB vendor list, while the rest of TCF compliance remains your responsibility.

Two Fixes Worth Knowing About

Location rules behind a proxy or CDN

WPConsent now does a better job identifying a visitor’s real IP address on sites behind proxies and CDNs. That means location-based banners work more reliably, including for visitors using IPv6 connections.

Scripts that stayed blocked after consent

Scripts now follow category consent more reliably. Even if a service name doesn’t exactly match our library, WPConsent applies the category’s consent instead. This helps services like reCAPTCHA behave as expected after visitors give consent.

We also polished a few everyday workflows in the WPConsent 1.1.8 update.

You can now save custom scripts and iframes without assigning them to a service. HTML formatting in custom banner messages survives when you edit a location group.

And a malformed translation can no longer prevent the WPConsent dashboard from loading.

Here is everything on the new release at a glance:

Getting Started

WPConsent 1.1.8 is another step toward making consent management simpler, more reliable, and easier to maintain.

If there’s something you’d like to see next, reach out and let us know. We read every suggestion, and many of our best improvements start with conversations like these.

Here’s how to get started:

• ✅ Update to WPConsent Pro 1.1.8
• ✅ Go to WPConsent → Settings and turn on Automatic Cleanup under Consent Logs
• ✅ Pick a retention window, from 3 months to 2 years
• ✅ Running TCF? Nothing to do. The Features tab updates itself once your vendor list refreshes
• ✅ Running the WP Consent API plugin? You’re covered automatically, no setup needed

If you’ve been meaning to clean up your consent logs and never got around to it, this is the version that does it for you.

Update WPConsent →