If you use analytics or other services that place cookies, you are legally required to ask for consent. Obelisk handles that with a neat cookie banner.
Automatic and tidy
As soon as tracking that requires consent is active, the banner appears by itself. Visitors choose whether to accept, and only then are the cookies loaded — exactly as privacy law (GDPR) requires.
In your own style and your own words
The banner matches the colours and look of your site, so it feels like part of your brand instead of an annoying pop-up. You can also fully customise the texts — from the explanation to the buttons — so the message fits your site and audience precisely.
Why consent management matters
Getting the cookie banner right is not just a legal checkbox — it directly affects how much of your traffic you can actually measure. Visitors who decline consent are invisible in your analytics, so a clear, trustworthy banner tends to get more visitors to opt in.
A common use case: you add a marketing pixel or chat widget through external scripts. Because that script places its own cookies, it only loads after a visitor accepts — so you stay compliant without checking every third-party tool by hand.
If your site serves more than one country, make sure the banner text is translated for each audience. See multilingual for how Obelisk handles language variants.
Practical tip: keep the banner text short and specific about what you use cookies for. A vague "we use cookies" message tends to convert worse than one that names the purpose, e.g. "to measure visits and improve the site".
What visitors actually see and decide
Most visitors decide within a second or two whether to accept, reject or ignore a cookie banner, so the first line of text carries more weight than the settings behind it. A banner that opens with legal boilerplate tends to get dismissed on reflex; one that opens with a plain, honest sentence about why you use cookies tends to get read.
Where the banner sits matters too. A banner that blocks the entire screen until a choice is made feels heavier than one that sits quietly at the bottom and lets people keep browsing while they decide — both are compliant, but they leave very different first impressions of your site.
Cookie banners across different kinds of sites
A webshop that relies on advertising and remarketing typically needs a fuller banner with separate categories — analytics, marketing, functional — because it is running more trackers than a simple brochure site. A small local business running only one tracking tool can usually get away with a much simpler accept/reject choice, since there is only one category to explain.
Membership sites and forums sit somewhere in between: they often add functional cookies for staying logged in, which do not need consent under most privacy rules, but are easy to mix up with tracking cookies that do. Being precise about which cookies fall in which category avoids asking for consent you don't actually need.
Common mistakes with consent
The most damaging mistake is loading a tracking script before a visitor has made a choice — that undermines the entire point of the banner and is exactly what data protection authorities look for during an audit. The second common mistake is making rejection harder to find than acceptance, for example burying a "reject all" option two menus deep. Regulators increasingly treat that as a dark pattern, and it also simply looks worse to visitors who notice.
If your site serves more than one language, remember that consent categories and button labels need translating too, not just the page around them — see how multilingual content works for the underlying mechanism. And consider adding a short FAQ about your cookie policy using the FAQ block, so visitors who want more detail than the banner offers can read it without leaving the page.
For background on how a compliant, trustworthy site connects to search visibility, see SEO and structured data — sites visitors trust tend to perform better across the board, not just legally.
How to ask the assistant
Enable a cookie banner and change the text to 'We use cookies to improve the site'.