Wording and design
What the banner says and how it looks.
The words
The banner says two things: what runs anyway, and what would run with permission. The second sentence names only the categories your site uses, so on a site with analytics and no ads, the banner never mentions ads.
The banner speaks 35 languages. These are every official EU language except Irish and Maltese (whose readers also have English), plus Norwegian, Icelandic, Catalan, Brazilian Portuguese, Indonesian, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Turkish, Chinese (simplified and traditional), Arabic and Hebrew. Arabic and Hebrew are shown right to left. Between them they cover every place where the banner asks first.
The banner uses your page’s language (the lang on your <html> tag) first, then the visitor’s browser languages, then your site’s default language.
If your visitors often read a different language from the one your pages are written in, turn on Show the banner in each visitor’s own language (Banner tab, under Advanced). The banner then follows the visitor’s browser first and your page’s language second.
On the Banner tab, you can pick a language and write your own title and text in it. The buttons keep our translation, and languages you haven’t written in use our translation throughout. As you type, we check that your text still says the site uses cookies and what they’re for, doesn’t push visitors to accept, and is in the language you picked. If it doesn’t, you’ll see a note, but it never stops you saving.
Under Buttons, the plain wording option replaces the button labels with ones that say what happens: “Allow tracking” and “Continue without tracking”. Research shows that wording like this raises the number of considered choices.
The design
- Position: bottom left by default. You can also choose bottom right, bottom centred or the middle of the page. In the middle, the banner covers the page and gets fewer interactions, so we don’t recommend it.
- Colours: button, button text, background, text and muted text. They are set from your site automatically, and you can change them with the pickers.
- Font: your site’s font, so the banner looks like part of the page.
- Corners: matched to the roundness of your buttons.
Match my site’s colours on the Banner tab rereads the latest check and applies what it found. If your button text would be hard to read on your button colour, we switch the text to black or white and tell you.
Contrast and accessibility
Text always meets WCAG AA contrast. The banner works with a keyboard, keeps focus inside it while it is open, has 44px touch targets, respects reduced-motion settings, and makes sure it never hides the page element that has focus.