Love them or hate them, but cookies are an integral part of the digital landscape. They are responsible for most of the comfort we experience while browsing or shopping online. They can save us time. Cookies can increasingly help websites provide a personalized user experience.
On the other hand, cookies can be intrusive to the point of being as scary as digital files can get. They can also raise security concerns. For the company that runs the world’s leading digital advertising giant, cookies are a tool they can use to put additional pressure on the competition.
Besides knowing your way around their many (mis)uses, you should also know how to manage WordPress cookies on your website.
In this article, we will show you:
When someone visits your website, a small text file containing some information is stored in the web browser. This file is called a cookie and can hold various information.. At a minimum, a WordPress cookie must have a name and value. However, some cookies store enough information about the user to enable their creators to keep track of their online activities, even when they browse another website.
Cookies aren’t the only file type that can be used to track people’s online activity. Tracking pixels, small transparent images that can even be embedded in emails, are a standard tracking tool used by marketers. Cookies differ from pixels by being central to a smooth user experience, although they can be used in unpleasant ways.
You can divide cookies into four different groups:
You can also divide cookies according to their purpose into strictly necessary cookies, preference cookies, statistical cookies, and marketing cookies.
Since they can store quite a lot of information about users, cookies are subject to local, national and supranational regulations. GDPR, the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, is an example of law that addresses the use of cookies and the data they may collect.
As a core feature, WordPress uses two types of cookies. User cookies are a type of cookies that store information that identifies you and your status as a logged in user.. This prevents you from logging in multiple times during the same session and can also help with personalization.
If your website visitors do not need to log in, only your admin team will receive this cookie. Because the cookie uses hashed data, you don’t have to worry about someone seeing your username and password if they get their hands on the cookie that contains them.
The other type of cookie that comes natively with WordPress is the commenter cookie. This cookie is used to store information that visitors must enter before commenting.. If you plan to use these cookies with EU audiences, you must add a checkbox for GDPR compliance.
Your website will not be limited to using only these two types of cookies.. The themes you install, the add-ons you use, and the advertising and marketing services you subscribe to may also add cookies to your visitors’ browsers. By installing just a few plugins, you can quickly switch from using two types of cookies to using twenty cookies.
For the most part, managing cookies on your website requires knowing about the cookies your plugins and themes are using and letting visitors know that you are using the plugins. Again, you must do this so that you and your target audience are compliant with the regulatory framework to which they belong.
For example, if you are using a shop WordPress theme and rely on WooCommerce to power it, You should know that WooCommerce uses eight different cookies, five of which are session plugins..
When it comes to managing your cookies, you can do three different things with them. You can set them, retrieve information from them, and delete them.
How to Set WordPress Cookies
The most important thing to know about setting WordPress cookies is that you do this by editing the function.php file.. This means that you should be comfortable creating a child theme and have some knowledge of PHP.
You set a cookie in WordPress using the setcookie() function. The syntax would look something like this:
setcookie (parameters separated by commas)
The parameters you can use include:
Only name and value are required. The remaining parameters are optional. Here’s an example of a cookie created using the init hook to ensure the nesting happens before the header is sent:
function tiny_cookie() {
setcookie( ‘cookie-name’, 'test', time() + 5 * 604800 );
}
add_action( 'init', 'tiny_cookie' );
With this, we set a cookie that stores the “test” value on the visitor’s computer and lasts for five weeks.
How to Get Cookies
When you “receive” a WordPress cookie, you receive its information.. Setting a cookie and not receiving its information defeats the purpose of placing the cookie in the first place.
Here are a few things we need. First we will need to make sure the cookie is set and we will do this using the isset() function.. We’ll use the $_COOKIE variable to collapse our cookie and the echo() function to display the values.
Here’s what it will look like:
if( ! isset( $_COOKIE['cookie-name'] ) ) {
echo "The cookie: '" . "cookie-name" . "' is not set.";
} else {
echo "The cookie '" . "cookie-name" . "' is set.";
echo "Value of cookie: " . $_COOKIE['cookie-name'];
}
}
add_action( 'init', 'tiny_cookie_check' );
If the cookie is set, you will be notified that it has been set and you will see the visitor username. If the cookie is not set, you will be informed about it.
How to Delete Cookies
When it’s time to delete the cookie, you can either unset it using the unset() function or set the expiration date in the past so it expires. You can use both at the same time:
function unset_tiny_cookie() {
unset( $_COOKIE['cookie-name'] );
setcookie( 'cookie-name' , 'test', - 3600 );
}
add_action( 'init', 'unset_tiny_cookie' );
With that, you’ve done everything you can with WordPress cookies.
Let’s wrap it up!
The use of cookies today and the way they are legally regulated is an issue that we will not see to cool down anytime soon. But don’t let their lousy rap stop you from using them – cookies are essential to creating a good user experience.
If you are careful and practice due diligence, you can manage your website for years and always use cookies ethically. Whether you rely on third-party cookies or create your own, remember that doing so on your website makes you responsible for the use of cookies.
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