Searching for best GDPR plugin

Searching for best GDPR plugin

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.

  1. 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.

  2. 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…

  3. 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

  1. 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.

  1. There is no Dutch translation out of the box
  2. 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.
  3. With Google Tag Manager, it is much simpler - via events
  4. 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.”

At the end, which GDPR plugin to use?

In fact, the only dilemma I was left with in the end was whether to manually implement GDPR using the Orest Bida Cookie Consent JS plugin, or simply install the Wordpress CookieFox plugin.

Easier to implement is CookieFox, while it is equally fast and light, adding only about 30ms to the site’s loading speed. On the other hand, Orest Bida’s solution is visually more appealing or, in popular terms, “kills”.

There is a third possibility, however, which is to somehow implement the GDPR minimally and actually only inform the user about cookies. The author of the aforementioned performance analysis concludes at the end of his text: “Don’t use any Cookie Consent plugin unless you make as much money as Google or Amazon”. And I personally think there is a lot of truth in that.

Researching alternatives

Others, in order of preference: https://wordpress.org/plugins/gdpr-cookie-compliance/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/complianz-gdpr/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/cookie-law-info/

Even faster, but almost manual:

https://github.com/orestbida/cookieconsent https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kImx_yuaBIs https://www.great-tit.com/cookies-consent-in-wordpress-free-with-gtm/ or https://wordpress.org/plugins/easy-cookie-consent/

Woow: https://www.qboxmail.com/2022/02/16/be-compliant-with-the-cookie-law-for-free-with-open-source-software/

And Klaro is implemented: https://wordpress.org/plugins/klaro-consent-manager/ or Osano: https://github.com/osano/cookieconsent-wpplugin, https://docs.osano.com/installing-osano-on-wordpress


Onaj cookie JS script Osano, pa kako ga neko koristi, odnosno jednostavan primer upotrebe: WesztyWeb - Privacy Policy & GDPR Pop-Up Notice Using JS


Cookie Notice lite

Gijo Varghese: I made a 1 KB alternative to Cookie Notice WordPress Plugin

Stvarno UK Ministarstvo pravde ministryofjustice/cookie-compliance-for-wordpress: WP plugin that displays a cookie consent banner and opt-in setting page.


Za cookie:

oEmbed Manager sa repo Pierre-Lannoy/wp-oembed-manager: A WordPress plugin to manage oEmbed capabilities of your website and to take a new step in the GDPR compliance of your embedded content.


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date 10. Oct 2022 | modified 29. Dec 2023
filename: Plugins » GDPR Cookie Consent