I Cancelled Cookiebot | This Must Have WordPress Plugin Saves Me $301/Year!

If your WordPress site runs Google Analytics, an advertising pixel, an embedded video or almost any third-party service, it is probably setting cookies before your visitors have agreed to anything. Depending on where those visitors live, that is the part the law cares about.

For years I handled this with Cookiebot. It worked, and it cost me around $30 a month, roughly $360 a year. I have moved to Complianz, which covers the same ground for about $59 a year. This tutorial is the whole switch, set up step by step.

Why a banner on its own is not enough

Showing a "we use cookies" notice is the easy part. The harder requirement is that certain cookies and tracking scripts must not load at all until the visitor has consented. Working out which ones by hand, across every plugin and embed on your site, is where most people give up.

What Complianz actually does

Complianz is a privacy and cookie consent plugin for WordPress. Rather than dropping a banner on your site and leaving you to it, it walks you through a configuration wizard: where your visitors come from, which services you run, which documents you need. It configures the consent setup around those answers.

What the tutorial covers

• Installing Complianz and working through the configuration wizard
• Choosing the regions you need to support
• Styling the banner - text, buttons, colours, position - so it looks like part of your site
• Holding scripts back until consent has been given
• Setting up Google Consent Mode V2
• Running the cookie scan
• Generating the legal documents

Google Consent Mode V2

If you use Google for analytics or advertising, consent signals are now part of configuring the site correctly. Complianz can pass your visitors' choices through to supported Google services, so you are not building a consent system by hand.

The cookie scan

My favourite part. Instead of auditing your own site and hoping you caught everything, Complianz scans it and identifies the cookies and services it finds. Once you have a few plugins and a couple of embeds, that list is longer than you would guess.

The legal pages

Complianz can also generate the privacy documents your site needs. Depending on your site and the regions you serve, that can include a:

• Cookie policy
• Privacy statement
• Imprint
• Disclaimer

I go through the options so you can work out which ones are relevant to you.

Why I left Cookiebot

Price against functionality, and nothing more complicated than that. Cookiebot came to about $360 a year. Complianz Premium is about $59. That is roughly $301 back every year on a single site, and it does not feel like a downgrade to save it: the scanning, consent management, regional configuration, script blocking, Consent Mode support, document generation and customisation are all there.

Can you use it for free?

Yes. There is a free version in the WordPress plugin repository, so you can install it and start configuring today. Premium adds the more advanced pieces, and its yearly price is what makes it interesting next to platforms that bill every month.

Follow along

By the end you will have Complianz configured on your own site: regions set, banner styled, scripts held back until consent, Consent Mode wired up and your documents generated. You do not need to be a privacy expert or a developer to keep up.

One caveat: this is a practical tutorial, not legal advice. What applies to you depends on your site, your visitors and your jurisdiction. If you need certainty, talk to a qualified professional.