If you’ve used the Cookie Scanner, you already know how it works: it visits your website’s pages one at a time and notes down every cookie it finds along the way. To keep that process quick and light on resources, each scan covers up to 2,000 URLs by default. If your site has more pages than that, you’ll see a notification offering to raise the limit, but you’re never forced to. The default scan keeps working exactly as before if you’d rather leave it alone.
That raises the obvious question: is 2,000 pages actually enough?
Why the default limit works for most sites
The short answer is yes, for most websites. Here’s the reasoning behind it: a website’s cookies rarely depend on how many pages it has. They depend on what’s running across those pages, the same theme, the same plugins, the same analytics tag, the same chat widget or payment gateway. Since these are usually loaded site wide rather than page-by-page, the scanner tends to pick up almost everything within the first couple thousand pages it visits.
Take an online store as an example. It might have ten thousand product pages, but every one of them is likely pulling in the same tracking scripts and the same payment integration. Scanning page 5,000 or page 9,000 isn’t going to turn up a cookie that wasn’t already found on page 50.
When it’s worth scanning further
That said, there are websites where the default limit genuinely isn’t enough. If your site has sections built differently from one another, say a blog running one set of embeds and a landing-page funnel running an entirely different marketing stack, cookies can be scattered rather than shared. The same goes for sites with a lot of custom-built page templates, or landing pages that each pull in their own tracking tools. In those cases, a wider scan gives you a fuller, more accurate picture, which matters if you’re relying on it for compliance.
It’s worth being upfront about the trade-off too: the scanner can only find what it visits. On a large, highly customized site, pages that fall outside the scan simply won’t have their cookies detected automatically. This isn’t a flaw in the tool so much as a natural limit of any page-by-page scan.
If you already know what’s missing, though, you don’t need to rescan everything to fix it. You can add a cookie manually, name, provider, purpose, category, directly in the plugin. It’s often the faster route when you’re only missing a handful of cookies you can already identify.
What you get with the Scan Limit Enhancement
For sites that do need broader coverage, the Scan Limit Enhancement raises how many pages a single scan can process:
| Plan | Maximum Pages per Scan | Included Bonus |
|---|---|---|
| Scan Limit Enhancement – 10,000 | Up to 10,000 pages | Monthly Scheduled Scan |
| Scan Limit Enhancement – 20,000 | Up to 20,000 pages | Monthly Scheduled Scan |
| Scan Limit Enhancement – 30,000 | Up to 30,000 pages | Monthly Scheduled Scan |
Every tier also unlocks Monthly Scheduled Scanning at no extra cost. Once the license is active, the plugin runs a scan automatically each month, so newly added cookies get picked up without you having to remember to trigger a scan yourself.
Why this isn’t free for everyone
Scanning tens of thousands of pages instead of a couple thousand takes real resources: more crawling, more processing time, more server load, more storage. Those costs only show up on larger sites, so rather than build them into the price everyone pays, the enhancement is offered as an optional add-on for the sites that actually need it.
The bottom line
For most websites, the default 2,000 page scan already captures the overwhelming majority of cookies in use, and there’s no need to change anything. The enhancement earns its keep specifically when your site’s cookies are spread unevenly across a large number of pages, or when you want the added peace of mind of automatic monthly rescans keeping your inventory current.
