Why does your website need a website cookie policy?

A website cookie policy is a statement to the visitors to your website on what cookies are being used on the site, what data the cookies track, for what reason and where the data is being sent to. If you have a website in the UK, then you need a cookie policy. 

A cookie is a piece of memory which stores a user and what they get up to on a website. These cookies can be very useful for users and the website itself, for example, login details or custom preferences are saved by cookies so that if the user revisits the site, their data is remembered. You may have noticed that if you search up an item for a while that you will start to see adverts for the same item or adverts linked to that item. 

The different types of cookies are as follows:

• Visitor Preference Cookies: If you disable this cookie, the website will not be able to save your preferences. This means that every time you visit the website you will need to enable or disable cookies again.
• Operational Cookies: These cookies are needed for the website to function and so are not optional.
• 3rd Party Cookies: These cookies are usually for analytic purposes which improves a user’s experience by looking at the statistics of their time on the website. For example, this website uses Google Analytics to collect anonymous information such as the number of visitors to the site, and the most popular pages.

So, why do you need a website cookie policy?

It is required by law to be present on every website, getting consent from their visitors to the website to use their data – it is required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Usually, it is shown in the form of a pop-up or banner which is visible when a user first goes onto the website. It tells the user what cookies are being used on the site and gives the user the option to accept the policy or not. If you do not have a cookie policy, you could risk a fine or legal action from The Information Commissioners’ Office (ICO).

How do you get a website cookie policy?

As mentioned earlier, a cookie policy is usually in the form of a banner or pop-up. There are many plugins which create a banner or pop-up for the website. A few of the most popular plugins for this are GDPR Cookie Consent and Cookie Notice & Compliance for GDPR / CCPA. These plugins provide the website with a cookie policy pop-up or banner which can then be customized to follow your brand colours and tone. 

If you would not like to spend the time creating it or customizing it, I can create a cookie policy for you . You can check out a cookie policy that I made for one of my clients Jaspreet Garg on her homepage here. I also customized and went through the plugin process for the cookie policy on my own website which you can see below.