Customise a GDPR-friendly cookie banner, copy one snippet of code, and paste it into your site. No account, no monthly fee to start.
Paste it just before </body> on your site.
Consent plugins are the heaviest thing on many WordPress sites — several of them load their own JavaScript, stylesheets and remote calls before your page renders. For a banner that shows one message and two buttons, that is a poor trade, and it slows the Core Web Vitals that affect your ranking.
A single self-contained snippet does the same job with no plugin to update, no subscription, and nothing calling a third party.
footer.php, immediately before </body>. Use a child theme, or a theme update will wipe it.Adding the banner does not make you compliant. If Google Analytics, Meta Pixel or an advertising tag is already in your header, it fires on page load and sets its cookies before anyone clicks anything. The banner is then decoration over a breach.
Those scripts must be held back until consent is given. In practice that means moving them out of the header and firing them from the banner’s consent event instead.
If you use a caching plugin — WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, LiteSpeed — purge the cache after adding the banner. Cached pages will otherwise serve the old version to most visitors for hours.
Open your site in a private window, then look at Application → Cookies in your browser’s developer tools before clicking anything. If you see analytics or advertising cookies already present, the banner is not doing its job. After clicking accept, they should appear; after declining, they should not.
No. A single snippet pasted before the closing body tag does the same job without the loading cost of a consent plugin.
In footer.php just before the closing body tag, using a child theme — or via a code snippets plugin set to run in the footer.
Because scripts in your header fire on page load, before consent. They must be held back and triggered by the consent event instead.
Yes. Caching plugins will keep serving the pre-banner version of your pages until the cache is purged.