How to Block Cookies on Your WordPress Website?

Do third-party cookies make it hard for you to comply with major privacy laws like GDPR and CCPA? Read this blog post to learn how to block third-party cookies from loading until the user gives consent.

Your WordPress website might install various third-party cookies on your site visitors’ browsers, which could risk your compliance with GDPR and other cookie laws. 

In this article, we will show you how to block third-party cookies until the user gives consent. With our GDPR Cookie Consent plugin installed on your WordPress website, you can block third-party cookies automatically.

Having said that, let’s get started.

Third-party cookies are cookies placed on a visitor’s browser by domains other than the one they are visiting. They are used to track user activity on the website for different purposes, such as advertising, analytics, etc.

Say, for instance, you searched for a blog about Motorcycle riding gears for monsoon and then you visited Facebook and saw ads for Motorcycle riding gears. This is caused by Facebook cookies on the blog. The cookies will track your activities and preferences and use that information for advertising.

First-party cookies and third-party cookies are small pieces of text that carry information regarding website visitors. Both are commonly used to track site visitors’ activity and preferences. Their purpose for collecting information is what differentiates them.

First-party cookies collect information from website visitors to improve the user experience by saving the preferences and settings. Whereas third-party cookies are loaded by other domains to collect user information for third parties. They commonly use this information for targeted advertising.

As mentioned above, third-party cookies collect information from website visitors for advertisers and data brokers. This information is commonly used for marketing and analytical purposes.

Selling the information for advertising is not just the only issue with third-party cookies. Researchers at Kaspersky discovered trojans that can steal information from browser cookies and get into website visitors’ social media accounts. Many new cookie laws were introduced in order to prevent the security risks of cookies and protect the privacy of users.

We have a cookie compliance plugin that can help you with automatically blocking cookies on your WordPress website. The plugin helps you achieve GDPR compliance for WordPress websites. It can be used to create a cookie consent banner for your WordPress website. You can also create a cookie policy for your website using the template with this plugin.

So it is completely an all-in-one cookie compliance plugin for WordPress websites.

The below steps will guide you through the setup process of automatically blocking cookies on your website.

Step 1: Install WebToffee GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin

After purchasing the premium version, download the plugin installation file from the download section of your My Account page.

Install and activate the plugin on your WordPress dashboard. Refer to our article if you need help in plugin installation and activation.

Step 2: Create a Cookie Banner

After installing the plugin, go to the Cookie Consent menu from your WordPress dashboard.

• Under the Cookie Banner tab, select GDPR as the consent law type.
• Scroll down to the General settings.
• Select the Enable cookie banner checkbox. (If this option is enabled by default, keep it as is.)
• Add Geo-targeting if required.

• You can configure the IAB cookie banner and GCM integration if wanted.
• The plugin also allows you to customize the cookie banner, banner text, buttons, etc. But we will ignore those steps now.

• After making the necessary changes, click on Update Settings to save.

Step 3: Scan Website for Cookies

Now, we will scan the website to identify the third-party cookies.

• Go to the Manage Cookies tab.
• Click on the 🔍Cookie Scanner button and select Scan for cookies.

This will initiate the cookie scanning process on your website. Once the scanning is complete, the plugin will add the cookies to the cookie list under different categories.

It will automatically block the third-party cookies until the user gives consent.

From the above image, Advertising cookies from Google will be blocked from loading.

You can also manually add cookies to the list and choose to block them before consent.

If you want to disable third-party cookie blocking for any cookie categories, click on the ✏️Pen icon near the cookie category name.

Then check the Enable cookies prior to user consent checkbox. This will load the cookies without users consent.

Then, click on Save Changes.

You can give your users granular control over the types of cookies they accept or reject using the plugin we discussed in this article. The plugin also helps you add a cookie consent banner to your website. This is the only plugin you need to comply with GDPR and CCPA for using cookies on WordPress websites.

Hopefully, you now understand what third-party cookies are and how to block them automatically. Do you have any questions? Please feel free to ask in the comments section.