Add Manual Cookie Consent Using GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin

Ensure that the GDPR cookie consent plugin(PRO) is installed and activated on your site. The plugin gives provision for auto-scanning of cookies by using a cookie scanner. However, follow the below steps to manually insert cookies.

To add the cookies manually, click on the Add New button under GDPR Cookie Consent > Cookie List. Add the cookies and the cookie details from the Add New Cookie Type page. The following is a screenshot of the Add New Cookie Type page.

The following are the fields in the Add New Cookie Type page.

• Cookie Title – Add the title of the cookie. This field is for audit purposes, so this field allows you to add the name of the cookie in a user-friendly manner.
• Cookie description – This allows you to add the description of the plugin so that you can explain what the purpose of the cookie is, what it does, what data it collects, etc.
• Cookie Category – Add the category that the cookies belong to.
• Cookie Type – This is to indicate the type of the cookie. The types include persistent, session, or third-party. Persistent cookies are those that generally persists even after the browser is closed. Session cookies are those cookies that will expire when the session is over. Third-party cookies are the cookies that are installed by third-party services being used on the website.
• Cookie Duration – This is the time duration the cookies will be active on the browser. The easiest way to find out the duration of a cookie is from the developer console of the browser.
• Cookie Sensitivity – Cookies are either necessary or non-necessary. The necessary cookies are those cookies that, as the name indicates, are absolutely necessary for the website to function in its intended way. The users do not have the control to disable this category of the cookies. The non-necessary cookies are those cookies whose scripts need to be added in the plugin and that the users can enable/disable.
• Head Scripts/Body Scripts – This is where the scripts related to the cookies are to be added. If the scripts are added in the Head Scripts field, the scripts, on user consent, will be rendered in the head of the website and the scripts will be rendered in the body if added in the Body scripts area.

The screenshot below shows an example of adding Google Analytics cookies to the Cookie list from the Add New Cookie Type page:

After all the details have been added as above, click on the update button and the cookie will be added to the Cookie List.

The GDPR Cookie Consent gives the users granular control over the cookies that they want to allow. They can turn the cookies on/off in their browser depending on their category.

For this, the plugin gives you two predefined categories named Necessary and Non-necessary. You can add the necessary cookies of your website to the Necessary category. The users will not be able to disable the cookies that are categorized as Necessary. So the cookies that are essential for the functioning of the website should be added to this category.

For the rest of the non-necessary cookies used by the website, you can either add them to the Non-necessary category or you can create categories of your own. This allows you to create cookie categories like Analytics, Statistics, Advertisement, etc. based on the nature of the cookies.

To create a new category for the cookies, go to GDPR Cookie Consent > Cookie Category. This will take you to the Cookie Category page where you can add the name of the category, slug, description of the category, and give the priority to determine the order in which the categories will appear on the front end. If you enable the Load on Start option, scripts under the created category will be rendered without waiting for user consent on the first-page visit. This option is discreetly used only if you are sure that no user-sensitive data is being obtained via the specified scripts.

The categories thus added will be visible on the user-end on a pop-up when the user clicks on the Settings button on the cookie bar. When clicked on each category, the users will be shown the description of the category as added by the admin. The user can then choose to enable or disable the cookies of each category from the popup.

Note: The categories, either predefined or user-defined, are only visible on the popup when there are cookies added into that category.