CookieYes – Make your Website GDPR Compliant

People often find it time consuming and tiring, making sure policies are up to date on their websites, if there was just a product, that could do all of it for you with just one click and luckily, there is. Today’s product showcase is CookieYes and via CookieYes your entire website can become not only TDP are compliant, but also CCPA compliant. So without further ado, let’s dive into CookieYes and let me show you how you, with one click can make your entire website GDPR and CCPA compliant.

We are now inside CookieYes, and this is the dashboard where we get the overview of our cookies, our scripts, our categories and the pages we have scanned. Furthermore, when people start to either decline or accept your cookie, you will start seeing some consent ratio and some recent logs about who has done what. Of course, you can’t see personal information, but you can just see what type of session ID has approved or disapproved your cookies.

Moving onto the content banner, this is what’s displayed on your website. There are some small, cool features here. We can preview our own website. I have set it up on my test website right here and down here in the bottom, we can see the cookie consent with the reject all, accept all and the preferences. And this is how it looks on your website. Out here in the menu, you can change a lot of different things. You can change the layout, the content, the colours, the cookie preferences, the behaviour.

And you can add custom CSS if you want to do something they do not support within their editor. For instance, one thing could be that you want to change the design of the buttons that you have to do in custom CSS. I personally use a lot of round buttons and in here they only have the square buttons, so I can’t change that unless I add some custom CSS. But over here in the menu we can choose whether we want our website to be GDPR compliant, CCPA compliant or both elements.

If we do choose both elements right now, we only preview the banner for GDPR. We can also preview the banner for CCPA. Down here you can see the notice how it looks for CCPA and we can change the languages, you can see here they have a good amount of different languages as you can see right here. We can always change back to GDPR if we want to do that. And for the GDPR, we can choose how the consent type should be, whether it should be implicit, it should be explicit, it should be info or custom.

But in order for your website to be GDPR compliant, it needs to be explicit. Moving on down here, we choose the how the design should look, whether it should be in the bottom, in the top, how the banner type should be, or if it should be a box type in some of the corners. It is very easy and it’s very responsive the way when we change it, as soon as we change something, you can see it on the screen.

Again over here, you can see that we can choose whether we want to see it for the GDPR or the CCPA. Again, we can choose the languages we want to preview it in the cookie notice here is where we can change the text and of course, the button here. For the read more link we can of course, at an URL and we can allow category preview on banner. We can add the read more button and you can see it’s added down here and that if we want them to read more about our cookies, our policy or similar items, it is not necessary in order to become GDPR compliant.

But you can choose to do it if you really want to, please your visitors. Moving down here we have the privacy policy and this is when they click preferences down here in the cookie banner. Then they will get this where you can see privacy policy, necessary cookies, functional cookies, analytics, performance and advertisement. And this is the way your cookies are separated into different categories, depending on the cookie. Let’s say it’s a cookie you need to have in order for the website to work, then it would be a necessary cookie.

Furthermore, over here we have the buttons, again here we can only change the text of the buttons. We cannot change the design. But still it is something hopefully that will come in the future that we can easily change the design or at least choose some different types of designs for the buttons. The last thing down here is we can choose the labels for the table here. Well, right now, just says cookie type duration and description, you can change that if you want to, but is of course not necessary right now it works fine.

Moving onto the colours over here, we can choose a lot of different types of colours. Of course, we can first of all, choose whether we want it to be light mode or dark mode. I would like this to be supportive in terms of the website. So let’s say we have a website that is dark mode and light mode. I would like to see the cookie banner change after that, but maybe it’s something we’ll see in the future.

If you do not like any of the modes you can go to, either recommended or you can go to customise your colours if you do want to. And then you can choose whether you want to customise the colours for the cookie notice, the buttons and links or of course, the category. Just to confirm again, you can change the design of the buttons, only the colours and the text. Moving on to the cookie preferences here you can see what the default consent should be, whether it should be only necessary, it should be functional analytics and so on.

But in order to stay GDPR compliant, you can only have necessary cookies, checkmarked per default. Moving on to behaviour here is how should your cookie consent behave whether you want them to revisit the content button, you can enable that here. You can GEO-target your cookie banner if you do want to, and that is if you only want to show the GDPR for UK and Europe because that’s only where you need it, this is a very cool feature. So you do not exclude your American or Indian or overall, Asian visitors that they have to go through the GDPR, even though it’s not necessarily in those regions.

Furthermore, we can choose whether we should reload the page when they do act on the consent, whether they accept, reject or what they do. We can also load analytics cookies prior to the user consent and of course, show auditable. The last element down here is custom CSS, where you can just add custom CSS. There’s not a lot of guiding around this, I would like to see some more guiding around this because we don’t know how we can style the buttons if we do want to.

But of course we can always write the support. If you do want to you can also see how your consent banner looks on iPad and on the phone. This is very cool and very necessary, in order to design the cookie consent exactly as you want. In manage cookies is where we manage all of our cookies. What I have done is I have just scanned my website and I will show you that just in a minute. But here we can see all the cookies on my website.

And what is so great about CookieYes right now is that it has described all of my cookies automatically. All I have done is just pressed scan my website and then my website just became CDPR compliant with a click on a button. As you can see here, I have some type of cookies. It’s not so many, but of course, CookieYes’ own cookies. It has described itself, but for instance, there is an Elementor cookie, which it has described for me, and there is a PHP session ID cookie up here which it has also described for me.

So I didn’t have to do anything. Furthermore, it has also added the cookies into whatever is the category for it. So we have, for instance, analytics cookies here, which is for my Google Analytics and again has also described it for me and added it to the category that this works very great. I’m very impressed by this. Of course, you can also just change the language over here if you do want to, to see how it looks on different languages.

I just checked the Danish language here and it translates great. So that’s really, really good. Of course, if you do want to, you can also add cookies manually. If it is that it scans your website and it doesn’t find all the cookies or you do have a SaaS company and you want to add cookies manually, this is also possible. Now, the cookie scanner is where it finds all of the cookies. So in here you can see I can just press scan website for cookies and then what it will do is that it will scan maximum 600 pages because that’s the plan I am on.

And within those 600 pages, it will list all of the cookies it finds. You can of course exclude URL’s or include URLs that say you have more than 600 pages and there is a specific URL or multiple URLs that you do want it to scan, you can edit here. But of course, I’ll just press scan here. And then what it will do is that it will start the scanning and then it’ll scan the entire website. And one thing I’m really looking forward to is that they will add automatic scanning, which means that this process I’m doing right here will be automated for me.

So I don’t have to think at all about my cookies or my website staying GDPR compliant. Over here in the menu, we have the content lock. This is whenever someone acts on our cookie content, whether they accept or reject, we’ll be able to see it in here. And this is also necessary in order to stay one hundred percent GDPR compliant. The last two elements is the privacy policy where it is that it builds out our privacy policy for us and we can then add it to our website.

You can see we have here company and website info. We have collection of data, how we treat the data, the disclosure of data tracking technologies, data protection. And of course, in end we can generate it and then we can preview our privacy policy. And this privacy policy will then stay up to date. And we can then added to our website in order to one hundred percent again stay GDPR compliant. It works the same way with the cookie policy.

Here I have just pressed on cookie policy. We can then press save and proceed, of course, generate. And then here we have our cookie policy. We can then copy HTML or copy the text and enter it into our website. I’m very much looking forward to that they will make an iFrame or something similar, so we don’t have to always copy and paste it into our website. When it is we add a new cookie. This will be another feature that will automate the entire process and something that will just make CookieYes even better.

The last element is the site settings because up here you can add multiple websites depending on your plan, of course, but in here you choose how many languages you want your banner to be on. Right now you can choose up to thirty one. Of course, in the future that will come more. And over here is the script you need to enter on your website. This is just like adding Google analytics or something similar to your website. It is very simple to do, but overall that’s the functionality within CookieYes.

I do really enjoy the UX and it’s easy to use and this scanning functionality is just so worth it when it comes to CookieYes. Taking a look at the pricing structure of CookieYes, it consists of four plans and they all differ on the amount of pages that is being crawled and the feature set, it can be quite confusing, but when it is that you read it, it will all make sense. Often you can get started completely free and start out with your website.

And if you do have a big website with a lot of pages, you do need to upgrade. But what is so good about CookieYes is you can get started completely free so you can actually test out the product before it is that you need to pay anything. As you can see here on the screen where I’m showing the pricing structure, if you do want to get rid of the CookieYes branding, you need to get the most expensive plan there is.

Otherwise, if you don’t mind it, then I wouldn’t recommend you upgrading because it is only to remove the branding and it is not that important. But overall, you can see that it has great features and overall it works great. And as you just saw in the walk through the design and UX is just playing so well together, taking a look at the competitor to CookieYes. It is CookieBot and the way they differs is mainly on the design overall and the communication, because CookieYes has so much automation within and it’s such a big focus for them.

But CookieBot, however, is a little bit more manual. They do have automation as well, but their design is falling a bit behind compared to CookieYes. So I’ll definitely pick CookieYes over CookieBot. When we do look into the future of CookieYes, I couldn’t get much out of CookieYes. The only thing they’re working on at the moment is the automation around scanning cookies, because how it is right now is that you have to manually go in and press the button in order to scan your entire website.

It would be great if they could just add automation around that. So maybe once a week or one time every day, depending on how many cookies you add, they would just scan the website automatically to check whether there were any new cookies or not. And then, of course, describe them if they can. And if not, then send an email so we can act on it and describe it. Furthermore, of course, they need to always stay on top of all Europe’s regulations and all the CCPA regulations in order for their products still to be valid for all of their customers.

Now, who is CookieYes for it is mainly for Web developers, blogs, news sites and overall just websites who does not have a SaaS product. It is website owners, whether it’s Webshops, service websites, blogs, everyone who just need their website to be compliant, but not the SaaS companies because it cannot bypass the login and therefore it cannot make your entire website compliant. Now, moving on to the pros and cons, using CookieYes starting out with the pros is definitely that.

It’s easy to set up, it’s easy to maintain, it’s easy to use, and it’s easy to secure your entire website. The cons, however, is that you have to manually scan your entire website and you can’t design the buttons, which means that you can’t design the entire model, which is showing up when they need to approve or disapprove the cookies. Using cookieYes I saved so much time making sure my website is GDPR compliant just with one click. So yeah, that is my review of CookieYes.

If you liked the video, please give it a thumbs up. If you have any questions to CookieYes or other products you would like me to review, please leave a comment down below. Thank you so much for watching. Let’s catch up on the next one.