That cookie banner is there because you switched it on
The Dutch consumer association and dozens of other European civil society and citizens' organisations are calling on the EU to finally put an end to cookie banners and cookie walls. Good news if you spend a lot of time online. There is something in it for you as a site owner too: the banner on your website did not fall out of the sky. It is there because something is watching along that you once had installed.
Where that banner on your site comes from
I read the appeal at Emerce: the organisations call this the last chance to get rid of banners and cookie walls for good. Brussels will take its time. On your own site you can do something about it today.
A cookie banner is not a standard part of a website. It appeared because there are scripts on the page that store or forward something about your visitor: an analytics script, an advertising pixel, an embedded YouTube video, a font pulled from a Google server. If none of that is there, you have nothing to ask permission for. A site that only shows your own pages needs no consent.
The measuring kit is standard in the quote
Ask what a website costs to build and you will get quotes with a little measurement package baked in. Analytics in, pixel in, a heatmap script on top. It barely adds anything to the price, so it rarely gets taken out again.
Ask yourself one question: when did you last open that dashboard, and what did you do differently afterwards? If the answer is "never" or "no idea", you are paying for those scripts with something that never shows up in your books. Your visitor first gets a grey bar across your work, has to click, and only then sees what they came for. A photographer's site is mostly images. Hiding those images behind a consent question, for data you never look at, wastes your own work.
Put it next to your maintenance bill
This is not a technical project. It is half an hour of finding out what is actually running on your site. You can outsource the management of your website, but asking the question stays your job.
- Email whoever manages your site: which external scripts run on my website, and what does each one do? Ask for a list, not a story.
- Go down the list and cross off what you do not use. Unfamiliar name means out.
- Embedded videos and maps almost always drag trackers along. Replace them with an image and a link, or host the video yourself.
- Fonts loaded from an external server can simply live on your own site.
- Still want to know how many people drop by: your server already counts page requests, without storing anything about the visitor.
Then put it next to what you pay for maintenance. Every script that goes is one less thing that can break, one less thing to update, and one less reason to interrupt someone who just walked in.
What to do with this tomorrow
Do not wait for Brussels. Send that one email today asking which scripts are running. If no clear answer arrives within a week, that tells you something too.
Remove what you do not use. In many cases the banner disappears along with it, and you keep your visitors to yourself. Your site gets faster, you have less to maintain, and nobody else is building a profile of the people who come to look at your work.
I run on my own server in the Netherlands and I measure nothing about third-party visitors. Not because a law says so, but because I think a freelancer's work should stay theirs. And if you want the real sum of what you pay each month for tools and outsourced work, write it down once. That list tends to be more of a shock than the cookie banner.
Frequently asked questions
Am I required to have a cookie banner on my website?
No. Consent belongs to scripts that write to or read from your visitor's device when the site itself does not need that. If those are not there, you have nothing to ask. Do have someone check what is actually running before you remove the banner.
How do I find out which trackers are on my site?
Ask whoever built or manages your site for a plain list of names. If you have access yourself, your page source or your browser's network tab shows which external addresses get called. It is usually a short list, half of which you will not recognise.
I do want to know my visitor numbers. Possible without a banner?
Yes. Your server already logs how many pages are requested. There are also counters that keep no personal data and write nothing to your visitor's device. Have whoever manages your site confirm that the counter you pick really stores nothing.
