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This is a guest post by Haritha of Mozilor Technologies.
If you feel overwhelmed with all the requirements for complying with the GDPR; you are not alone. Most website owners have gone through the same “what to do and what not to” stage before ensuring the compliance of their website.
But…
If you own a WordPress website, you have the option to leave the whole compliance task to a plugin. There are quite a few numbers of free and premium plugins available to help you with it.
Keep reading to find the top picks.
GDPR plugins
This article lists a few such plugins which are capable of transforming the rather unnerving task of compliance to a much simpler one. But, at the same time providing your user’s with the best experience on your website. Go through it, and see which of them works best for your website.
Here are the top picks for the best WordPress GDPR plugins.
1. GDPR Cookie Consent
Plugin Description
GDPR Cookie Consent is a free plugin that will help your site comply with GDPR. It adds a small consent popup to your site that asks visitors for their consent before using cookies (besides essential). They can accept, decline, or manage their cookie settings using buttons in the modal, which appears at the bottom-right corner of the screen.
If visitors choose to manage their settings, they’ll get granular control over which cookies they want to opt-in to. All of this is configurable via the settings menu added to your WP admin dashboard. You can easily customize options like the message text, auto-enabling essential cookies, where the notice displays, and which cookies are controlled by the plugin from the settings menu.
Overall, it’s a very robust free plugin for managing your site’s cookie consent policy.
2. WordPress GDPR
Plugin Description
This GDPR plugin brings to you everything under one roof. Thus, you do not have to be relying on multiple plugins to ensure the compliance of your website. It’s been developed for the purpose of making the whole compliance process as easy and fast as possible for your WordPress website.
The plugin comes with a single click solution to ensure your website’s users with their right to be forgotten. Your users can request the erasure of their data through the “Forget Me” form provided by this plugin. In addition to this, it also provides forms for various purposes such as unsubscribing from newsletters, to contact the data protection officer, for requesting data, etc.
With this plugin, your users have entire power over their privacy settings. They are allowed to classify cookies and to enable them. The plugin also ensures your users with the opportunity to rectify their data and sends out privacy policy updates via email to them. Easy integration with top third-party services and plugins like Contact form 7, Facebook, MailChimp, BuddyPress, Google AdSense, Google Analytics, WPML ORG, etc is another benefit this plugin extends to you.
3. GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin
Plugin Description
This cookie consent plugin is a great solution to ensure your WordPress website’s GDPR cookie compliance. This plugin makes the otherwise complex process a very simple task for you to follow.
This GDPR plugin comes with multiple templates for the cookie notification banner you can choose from. If you think your WordPress website doesn’t match with any of the available templates or if you aren’t content with its elements you have the option to customize each of those elements and build your custom template. As it comes with an easy editor, you will find it easy to make changes to the templates.
With the help of this plugin, you can easily manage cookie lists and cookie categories. It can automatically scan for cookies on your website and also view and import cookies into your existing list of cookies or download it as a CSV file. The most striking feature you can avail by using this plugin would be its feature to let your users to opt-in for cookies on a granular basis. This feature provides your users with a higher degree of control over giving consent to cookies.
The plugin extends you the option to exclude cookie notice for countries where GDPR doesn’t apply. It is a very useful feature as it helps your website to function in a normal way for viewers outside of the European Union. With its auto script-block feature it will automatically identify and block scripts of various popular third-party services that install cookies (Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, Google Tag Manager, Hotjar Analytics, Youtube, Vimeo, Twitter widget, Google Maps, Addthis widget, ShareThis widget, Twitter Widget, Sound cloud, Slideshare, etc) until the users have given their consent.
Consent log, Customizable cookie notice, WPML support, etc are the additional features offered by this plugin.
4. Cookie Plus
Plugin Description
Cookie Plus is a perfect solution to ensure cookie compliance of your WordPress website. With this plugin in your website, cookies will only be added to your user’s browser after explicitly procuring user consent. It automatically blocks all non-essential cookies from your website and also prevents plugins or scripts from adding cookies on the browser.
Cookie Plus comes with five categories of cookies so that your users are in control of activating or deactivating cookies as per their convenience. In addition to GDPR, this plugin also lets your website to comply with the EU Cookie law, United States Cookie Law, UK Cookie Law, German Cookie Law, and Italian Cookie Law. With the help of the Geo-IP location feature of this plugin, you can configure to show cookie pop-ups to only EU countries.
This plugin offers you with 8 different cookie popup templates to choose from which are fully customizable to your preference. As this plugin is WPML compatible, you will find it easy to translate your cookie popup into any language you prefer. This plugin also shows compatibility with popular third-party services like Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Google AdWords, Facebook Pixel, and Hotjar and more.
5. Complianz
Plugin Description
This Complianz plugin enables your website to accomplish GDPR compliance in a very effortless way. In addition to GDPR, this plugin also ensures your website’s compliance with some other major laws such as ePrivacy, CCPA, COPPA, US Privacy Laws, etc along with their legal updates.
Your website’s compliance with the GDPR or any other privacy laws will not be complete without setting up legal documents on your site. And for those of you who find this task laborious, this plugin will help you with some excellent set of features like a personal dashboard which you can use to set up and monitor legal documents.
For generating privacy statements and cookie policy, this plugin provides you with a Setup Wizard. Disclaimer and Data Processing Agreement documents can also be created easily with the help of this plugin. This plugin comes with some advanced features for cookie settings such as the fully customizable appearance of cookie notice, automatic script-blocking of nonfunctional cookies, location-specific display of cookie notification (by enabling the Geo-location feature within this plugin), etc.
With this plugin’s statistics dashboard, you will be able to get insights into your users/customers’ different consent preferences. Using these statistics you will be able to increase the user-friendliness of your cookie consent notification and improve the conversion rate for the consents given. A/B testing tool is another great benefit you can avail with this plugin. Apart from all these features, you can have your website scanned and keep all your website’s data safe from loss in the event of a data breach with the plugin’s inventory and document features.
6. WP AutoTerms
Plugin Description
This WordPress plugin is a superb companion for your website in complying with the GDPR and other privacy laws. It helps you in creating all the legal documents required for your WordPress website. This plugin comes with a number of features such as the option to create a GDPR privacy policy, terms and conditions, generation and management of custom legal pages, etc.
Apart from helping you create legal documents for your website, WP AutoTerms plugin also allows you to enable a cookie notice banner on your website so that you are able to inform your users that cookies are in use on your website. There is also another option to automatically link to your legal pages from the footer section of your website and to notify users regarding any recent update.
Which GDPR plugin is best?
Employing a GDPR plugin in your WordPress website is indeed a right course of action for compliance of your website. But along with that, you might want to analyze other aspects of your website as well for ensuring 100% compliance.
There are lots of great options here, but you should consider both WordPress GDPR and GDPR Cookie Consent as your first options due to their ease-of-use and high ratings from customers.
Disclaimer: This article should not be treated as legal advice, rather a resource that can help in the process of the GDPR compliance.
