Frequently Asked Questions
What do you mean when you say other plugins are 'invasive'?
Most GDPR and Cookie Consent services work by interfering with the functionality of the website to not allow parts of the code to run prior to obtaining consent from the user.
This includes aspects such as Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google Consent and Google Maps - however, this also includes other services such as Google Fonts and Google reCaptcha to name but a few.
This means that your website may not appear correctly due to fonts not loading and your visitors will not be able to send you messages via your contact forms because Google reCaptcha will not work properly.
When you consider that your website will have been developed to look and operate in a certain way and with WordPress and its plugins to expect to be able to operate - effectively what is happening is these services are pulling the rug from underneath the operation of the website. The plugins expect to be able to do their job (which often rely on cookies) but are unable to do so because their functionality has been manipulated with. This can cause a lack of operation or even complete instability which can cause the website to fail.
What does Simple Cookie Consent do differently?
Simple Cookie Consent doesn't interfere with the operation of the website, its plugins or its functionality - it works harmoniously and in conjunction with the website in order to be able to provide notification and consent.
Does this mean Simple Cookie Consent is more reliable?
Very much so and most definitely, yes.
Simple Cookie Consent is very efficient too. It is a light-weight plugin which means it doesn't have much, if any overhead on the performance of the website and in fact will be much quicker, faster and efficient than any external services.
The third-party external services work by the website talking back to 'base' in order to load the consent tool and display it within the page. This can often result in many 'calls' all of which add latency to the loading time of the page. When you consider that some of these services are located in the USA, this means you are potentially adding a quarter of a second (or multiples thereof) to the loading time of you website.
We are also aware of third party services having outages which will affect the delivery of content to your website - which as a direct result means you are not GDPR or DPA compliant all the time the service is offline.
You don't have any of those worries with Simple Cookie Consent.
Can Simple Cookie Consent be used for any other purposes?
Absolutely - if there is a requirement to output code to the header or body of a page, generate a notification and/or activate services or website functionality based on the choice of the user.
The code sections can include what you need them to include which can be content as well the inclusion of separate resource files, functionality, theme files - anything.
You could for instance have different style files so that the user could choose the style of website they wish to interact with or you could use it for accessibility options based on user choice.
So we say Simple Cookie Consent is flexible, we really mean it.