Cookiebot Review: Easy Cookie Consent for Any Website

Why Cookie Consent Actually Matters

If you're running a business website and using tools like Google Analytics, the Facebook pixel, or anything else that tracks visitors, you need a way to get consent before those cookies start doing their thing. This isn't optional — play silly games, win silly prizes, and the prizes in this case are fines and legal headaches you really don't want.

A lot of people grab a free WordPress plugin that pops up a little banner, the visitor clicks "OK," and nothing actually changes behind the scenes. The cookies were already firing before anyone gave permission. That's not compliance — that's decoration. A proper consent tool needs to actually block cookies until the visitor says yes, and that's exactly what separates Cookiebot from the throwaway solutions.

Cookiebot Pricing: Free for Small Sites

One of the best things about Cookiebot is the pricing structure. If your website has fewer than 50 pages, you can use it completely free — forever. For a business portfolio site or a small company website, you may never outgrow that free tier.

If you do have a larger site, paid plans start at just eight dollars a month. Compared to the cost of a GDPR fine or even the hourly rate of a lawyer reviewing your compliance setup, that's a rounding error. No credit card is required to get started, so there's genuinely no risk in trying it out.

Getting Started and Adding Your Domain

Setup is refreshingly straightforward. Head to the Cookiebot website, click the "Start Free" button, and run through a quick onboarding where you create a username and password. Then you add your first domain — just type in the URL and you're off to the races.

Once your domain is added, Cookiebot walks you through the configuration steps. The interface is clean and logical, which is a relief if you've ever wrestled with compliance tools that feel like they were designed by lawyers rather than designers.

Choosing the Right Legislation Preset

Cookiebot offers legislation presets to get you started, and your first instinct might be to select every single one. You can't — you pick one as your baseline. If you want the broadest coverage, go with GDPR. It's the strictest compliance standard, so choosing it means you'll likely satisfy the requirements for most other regions as well.

Don't worry too much about getting this perfect on the first try. You can customize the geo-targeting settings later to fine-tune exactly who sees your consent banner and under which rules. Think of the preset as a sensible starting point, not a permanent decision.

Designing a Consent Banner That Doesn't Look Terrible

One of my biggest complaints with other cookie consent tools is that they're just flat-out ugly. Cookiebot gives you real design control. You can choose between a dialogue-style modal popup or a traditional banner layout, toggle an overlay effect, and pick from light, dark, or fully custom color schemes.

The live preview updates in real time as you make changes, which makes the whole process genuinely enjoyable. You can match the banner to your brand colors using a color picker, upload your logo via drag-and-drop, and fine-tune the look until it feels like a natural part of your site rather than an afterthought bolted on top.

There are also layout options for how granular the consent choices appear. The multi-level layout shows individual toggle switches for different cookie categories — necessary, preferences, statistics, marketing — which is the most privacy-friendly approach. If that feels overwhelming for your audience, you can simplify it down to a single "Allow All" button or something in between.

Compliance Options: Explicit vs. Implied Consent

Under the compliance settings, the first decision is your consent method. Explicit consent means the visitor must interact with the banner before they can use your site — cookies are fully blocked until they respond. This is the safest option and what most people should stick with.

Implied consent is a more lenient approach that lets visitors browse freely even if they ignore the banner. Whether this is legal depends on your jurisdiction, so this is one of those "check with your legal team" situations. The good news is you can switch between these at any time, so if you start with explicit and find it's hurting your bounce rate, you have options.

The button configuration is surprisingly flexible too. You can mix and match buttons — allow all, deny all, customize — and preview each combination instantly. There's no guesswork about what your visitors will see.

Geo-Targeting: Show Banners Only Where You Need To

This is one of my favorite Cookiebot features. You can control exactly which visitors see the consent banner based on their location — down to the state level in the United States. If you only need to be GDPR-compliant for EU visitors and cover a couple of U.S. states with strict privacy laws like California and Colorado, you can set exactly that.

Some site owners don't want a consent banner cluttering their experience for visitors in regions where it's not legally required. Others believe every visitor deserves transparency about tracking. Cookiebot supports both philosophies. You can target specific regions, entire continents, or simply select "All Visitors" and show the banner to everyone.

Language and Content Customization

Cookiebot can automatically detect the language of your website and translate the consent banner for international visitors, which is a huge time saver if you serve a global audience. You can also set a default language and add additional languages manually.

Every piece of text in the banner is fully customizable. Button labels, descriptions, header text — all of it can be rewritten to match your brand voice. Want to be more casual or humorous? Go for it. That said, if you're not confident about the legal language, leaving the defaults is a perfectly smart move. They've been crafted to be compliant out of the box.

The Privacy Trigger Button

After a visitor dismisses the consent banner, there's a small floating button — the privacy trigger — that lets them go back and change their settings at any time. By default it sits in the bottom corner of your screen, but you can reposition it to any corner.

You can also turn it off entirely, and honestly, I understand why you might want to. That corner real estate is valuable — you might already have a chat widget, an AI assistant, or a support button fighting for the same space. But if you do disable the privacy trigger, you'll need to manually add a cookie declaration page somewhere on your site so visitors can still review and modify their consent. Cookiebot provides this declaration content for you; you just need to place it.

Deploying Cookiebot on WordPress

Implementation works on any website — hand-coded, Wix, Squarespace, whatever — via a simple script embed. But if you're on WordPress, there's a dedicated plugin that makes things even easier.

Search for "Cookiebot" in the WordPress plugin directory, install and activate it, then grab your Domain Group ID from the Cookiebot dashboard. Paste that ID into the plugin settings, hit connect, and you're done. The plugin gives you access to some of the same settings you configured in the Cookiebot dashboard, plus the ability to quickly toggle the banner on and off if you need to make changes.

For cookie blocking, I recommend leaving the method set to automatic. Cookiebot will handle detecting and blocking cookies before consent is given without you needing to manually tag scripts. There is a manual mode for power users, but for the vast majority of sites, automatic is the way to go.

Live Results: What Visitors Actually See

Once deployed, the consent banner appears exactly as you designed it. Visitors can toggle individual cookie categories, and here's the part that really matters — they can drill into the details to see exactly what cookies were found on your site. On a demo site, Cookiebot detected 19 marketing cookies, including ones from Google Analytics and embedded YouTube videos.

This level of transparency is what sets a real consent management platform apart from a cosmetic popup. Your visitors can see precisely what's being tracked, make informed choices, and your site respects those choices by actually blocking the cookies until permission is granted.

Automatic Scanning and Ongoing Maintenance

Cookiebot automatically scans your website once a month to detect any new cookies that may have appeared — maybe you added a new analytics tool, embedded a third-party widget, or installed a plugin that sets its own cookies. The scan picks these up and adds them to your consent categories automatically.

You can also trigger a manual scan anytime from the domain overview dashboard. There's a daily scan option available for 99 euros per month, but honestly, monthly scanning is more than sufficient for nearly every website. The set-it-and-forget-it nature of this ongoing maintenance is a massive time saver, especially if you manage multiple client sites.

Final Verdict: Is Cookiebot Worth It?

Cookiebot has become my go-to recommendation for cookie consent on client websites, and it's the tool I'll be using going forward. The setup is simple, the design customization is genuinely good, and the automatic cookie scanning means you're not constantly babysitting your compliance.

The free tier for sites under 50 pages is generous enough for many small businesses, and the paid plans are priced reasonably for what you get. If you've been putting off cookie consent because it seemed complicated or expensive, Cookiebot removes both of those excuses. It's one of those tools that just works the way you'd hope it would.

Watch the Full Video

Prefer watching to reading? Check out the full video on YouTube for a complete walkthrough with live demos and commentary.