Five mistakes teams make with cookie consent

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. These are the ones we run into repeatedly when we audit cookie consent.

Security is a maintenance habit rather than a purchase, which is why it drifts. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

What to watch for

• Treating it as a launch task rather than an ongoing one
• Assuming someone else already owns it
• A banner does not make non-compliant tracking compliant
• Non-essential scripts must wait for consent
• Never checking whether the fix actually worked

Make refusing as easy as accepting. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

A reasonable first step

What this looks like day to day

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. Three things worth confirming about cookie consent before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Non-essential scripts must wait for consent — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.