If your website runs multiple sections under different subdirectories, you may have noticed visitors being asked to accept cookies again as they move between these paths. This happens because, by default, browsers can scope a cookie to the specific path it was set on, rather than the whole domain.
The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin’s Share consent across site paths setting fixes this by making sure a visitor’s consent choice applies across your entire site, not just the folder they happened to give it on.
When You Should Enable Consent Sharing Across Site Paths
This setting is most useful if your site has:
- Multiple subdirectories that visitors move between (blog, store, docs, landing pages, etc.)
- A WordPress multisite setup using subdirectories rather than subdomains
- Any structure where you’ve noticed the cookie banner reappearing after a visitor navigates to a different section of the site
If your site is a single, flat structure with no subdirectories, this setting won’t change anything, since the consent cookie would already apply everywhere by default.
What This Setting Does
When enabled, the plugin sets the consent cookie’s path to / instead of the specific subdirectory the visitor was on when they responded to the banner. Since the cookie is now valid for the whole domain, the browser sends it along with every request, no matter which subdirectory the visitor is browsing.
In practice, this means:
- A visitor who accepts or rejects cookies on one part of your site won’t be asked again on another.
- Consent is recorded once and honored site-wide.
- There’s no need to duplicate consent logic across separate installations of the same site structure.
Steps to Enable Consent Sharing Across Setting
- Go to Cookie Consent > Advanced.
- Locate Share consent across site paths.
- Toggle it on.
That’s it. There’s no additional configuration involved; the plugin handles the cookie path change automatically.
This setting controls the path of the consent cookie, not its domain. It doesn’t extend consent across separate domains or subdomains, only across different paths within the same domain.
