GDPR Plugins: Please avoid Real Cookie Banner
Real Cookie Banner and why I don’t like it? Navešću samo deo problema.
Unfairly hidden and default options that mean nothing to us as a user
At first glance, Real Cookie Banner is a quite solid plugin, but when you dig a little deeper into the work, you discover a lot of problems that are really annoying.
-
Every time I changed some content on the site, the plugin threw a message that “cookie scanner can’t scan page”. The message itself is not important, but what is important is that the plugin seems to be constantly scanning something, even though officially that cookie scanner has finished its work and is shut down.
-
The plugin inserts links to the author’s site, all together with the included “follow” attribute on the links, in order to steal some of the SEO “juice” and transfer it to your site. The option to remove this ad for the plugin is really hidden and undocumented, and besides, I think the default activation of this option is a shame for any honest developer. The switch to disable this option is located in Customizer > Cookie Banner > Footer > Show Powered by…
-
The author brags about the nebulous option “Anti-Ad-Blocker” with which he prevents Ad-blockers. I wonder why because this option has absolutely no logic. On the technical side, this “advanced” system just calls JS and CSS files by random names and renames them regularly so that it is almost impossible to optimize the loading of these JS files. Fortunately, this option can be turned off, although I didn’t find a description of how to turn it off anywhere, so I had to search and discover it myself. Finally, it is located in Customizer > Cookie Banner > Custom CSS > Anti-Adblocker optimization
Source: Real Cookie Banner vs other Cookie Plugins
- Super-important options are often hidden in the illogical depths of the Customizer, and I’m sure it’s no accident. Namely, if the “SEO links” option can somehow be classified under the “Customizer” section, turning off the “Anti-Ad-Blocker” option has absolutely nothing to look for in the Customizer, except to be “accidentally” hidden.
In addition to the above problems, the documentation for the plugin is abysmal.
Additional problems with Real Cookie Banner on our site:
- There is no Dutch translation out of the box
- If no consent is given as a whole, it is too complicated to do it for every service. Nobody does that really, and we do not need to go into such details.
- With Google Tag Manager, it is much simpler - via events
- Steal descriptions from various plugins
Performance considerations
The general impression on the backend when working with this plugin is - very slow. I don’t know why this is so, but I don’t think that the GDPR plugin is so important that it completely “kills” my normal work.
I’ve confirmed that with a plugin author in this support thread: Annoying Background Scans
As for the speed on the front-end, based on sources on the Internet, it seems that the plugin is also slow there, in fact, it seems to be the absolute slowest of all tested plugins. It adds a whopping 200ms to the page load time.
Based on this text here: Which Cookie Consent plugins are slowest?, I quote: “The worst slug is WordPress Real Cookie Banner. Almost 200 milliseconds. That is 10 percent of the performance budget.”