Why my websites don't need a cookie banner
No box covering half the screen. Not because I ignore the rules, but because my sites don't do anything they'd need to ask about.
You know the drill: you open a website, and before you can even see where you are, a box covers half the screen. “Accept all”, “Settings”, “Reject all”. On a phone, that's often the first impression a business makes. On my sites that box doesn't exist, and that's not an oversight.
When a banner is required
The EU rule is fairly simple: a website has to ask before it stores anything on your device that it doesn't strictly need, or before it sends your data to other companies. A shopping basket that remembers your products is necessary and needs no question. A Google tracker, a Facebook pixel or an embedded YouTube video does. As soon as something like that loads, it needs your consent, and so the banner.
Why almost every WordPress site has one
WordPress itself isn't really the problem. The problem is everything hung around it: a bought theme that loads its fonts from Google's servers, a contact form with Google's reCAPTCHA, a plugin for the map, one for Instagram, one for statistics, a page builder that fetches pieces from other servers. Each one means well. Together they send data on every visit to companies the business often doesn't even know about. Then you need the banner, and usually another plugin to manage it.
What my sites do differently
I build every site by hand and load nothing from outside: fonts, images and scripts sit on my own server. If a client wants to know how many people drop by, ContentCore counts without cookies and without sending anything to third parties, on my server too. So there's nothing anyone needs to be asked permission for. No banner here doesn't mean “rules ignored”, it means nothing to hide.
Checked, not just claimed
On 25 October 2026 I checked laconis.be and all six client sites that are online in the browser: not a single cookie, not a single request to an outside server. Anyone can check this, in the browser under developer tools, Network tab. It takes a minute and is surprisingly revealing, on other sites too.
And if you do need something from outside?
Sometimes a business wants to track its ads or show a YouTube video. That's fine, but then a banner honestly belongs with it. I'll tell you up front what it costs: not in euros, but in first impressions.