I built another WordPress plugin.
This one came about because I needed what I thought should be a fairly simple thing: a good WordPress cookie consent plugin that could actually block scripts until a visitor gave consent, didn’t turn into another monthly SaaS bill as a website became more popular, and didn’t require me to buy a privacy policy generator I wasn’t looking for.
That proved to be harder to find than I expected.
There are certainly plenty of cookie banners and consent management platforms available for WordPress. Some are very good. But I kept running into the same two things: pricing tied to monthly pageviews or visitors, and increasingly large compliance platforms bundling cookie consent together with privacy policies, legal document generators, and a collection of other services.
Those products have their place. They just weren’t what I wanted.
I wanted the cookie consent part.
So I built Consent Warden.
A WordPress cookie consent plugin without the pageview tax
Consent Warden is a WordPress cookie consent plugin built around a fairly straightforward idea: the amount of traffic your website receives shouldn’t determine what you pay for the software installed on it.
There are no monthly pageview limits. There are no visitor limits. A surprise spike in traffic doesn’t move you into another pricing tier.
The paid editions are licensed according to the number of WordPress sites where you use the plugin, and that’s it.
I also didn’t want Consent Warden to become another privacy-policy-as-a-service platform. There are already plenty of companies doing that, and I’m not interested in pretending a WordPress plugin can replace an attorney.
Consent Warden concentrates on managing cookie consent: displaying the banner, recording the visitor’s choices, controlling which categories are allowed, preventing scripts from running before consent where appropriate, and providing the additional reporting and geographic controls that larger sites may need.
There are currently three editions: Free, Standard, and Pro.
Consent Warden Free
The free version is available through the official WordPress.org plugin directory.
Consent Warden Free is intentionally simple. If you need a clean cookie banner on a WordPress site without loading another frontend framework or connecting your site to an external consent service, this is where to start.
The Free edition includes:
- A customizable WordPress cookie consent banner
- Three banner positions: bottom bar, bottom-left card, and bottom-right card
- A simple Accept flow
- Customizable heading, message, and button text
- An optional privacy policy link
- Basic banner color customization
- Configurable consent expiration
- An accessible frontend implementation
- A JavaScript event developers can hook into when consent is accepted
- Zero external frontend dependencies
The visitor’s choice is stored in their browser. The Free edition doesn’t send that consent information off to some external service, and there isn’t a remote dashboard sitting between WordPress and the person visiting your site.
There is also an important distinction here: Free is a cookie notice and basic consent mechanism. It does not perform automatic script blocking.
If you’re running analytics, advertising, marketing pixels, or other non-essential scripts that need to be prevented from loading before consent is granted, that’s where Standard comes in.
Consent Warden Standard
Consent Warden Standard is really the edition I had in mind when I started building this.
Standard starts at $29 per year for one website and adds actual consent enforcement rather than simply displaying a banner.
You get the full Accept / Manage / Reject workflow along with four consent categories:
- Necessary
- Analytics
- Marketing
- Preferences
The names, descriptions, and default opt-in states can be configured from WordPress.
More importantly, Standard adds two levels of cookie and script blocking.
The first is a soft blocking system that can dequeue WordPress scripts before they are sent to the browser. The second is a harder HTML-level blocking system designed to catch scripts that weren’t added through the normal WordPress enqueue system.
When the visitor gives consent, the appropriate scripts can be enabled without requiring a page reload. If they later revoke consent, configured cookies can also be deleted.
Standard also adds Google Consent Mode v2 integration for sites using Google Analytics 4, Google Ads, Google Tag Manager, or related Google services.
For developers, there is a public JavaScript API and browser events for checking consent and reacting when visitors grant, update, or revoke it.
There are some quality-of-life additions too: four banner positions including a modal, a button for reopening consent preferences, much deeper appearance customization, a live preview in the WordPress admin, 30-day consent summary statistics, and WordPress-native automatic updates.
In other words, this is the version for sites that need more than a decorative “We use cookies” message.
Consent Warden Pro
Consent Warden Pro includes everything in Standard and adds the features aimed more toward agencies, publishers, higher-traffic websites, and organizations with additional auditing requirements.
The biggest addition is geo-targeted cookie consent.
Not every visitor necessarily needs to see the same consent experience. Pro can determine a visitor’s general region and limit the banner to configured locations, with presets for the EU/EEA, United Kingdom, United States/CCPA use cases, and Brazil, along with custom country lists.
Location detection can use the visitor’s browser timezone, Cloudflare’s country header, or ip-api.com depending on how the site is configured.
Pro also includes a runtime cookie scanner. It watches for cookies being created while the site is running and can help uncover cookies that need to be categorized or accounted for.
Then there are the auditing tools.
Pro provides a full consent log with filtering, CSV export, and a configurable retention period. Consent records use anonymized identifiers rather than storing the visitor’s raw IP address.
Priority support is included as well.
Pricing that doesn’t care how popular your website gets
I wanted the pricing model to stay predictable.
Consent Warden doesn’t charge based on pageviews, visitors, banner displays, consent requests, or how unfortunate you are to have one of your pages suddenly make the front page of Reddit.
Standard pricing is:
| License | Sites | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Personal | 1 site | $29/year |
| Business | 5 sites | $69/year |
| Agency | 25 sites | $119/year |
Pro pricing is:
| License | Sites | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Personal | 1 site | $69/year |
| Business | 5 sites | $139/year |
| Agency | Unlimited sites | $249/year |
Development and staging installations such as localhost, .local, .test, and staging domains don’t count against the normal site limit.
Where to get Consent Warden
If you want to try Consent Warden, you have a few options.
- Consent Warden Free can be installed from the official WordPress.org plugin directory. You can also search for Consent Warden directly from Plugins > Add New inside WordPress.
- Consent Warden Standard is available from the LinuxGnut store, starting at $29/year.
- Consent Warden Pro is available from the LinuxGnut store, starting at $69/year.
You can also see the complete feature comparison between all three editions on the Consent Warden project page.
And this is version 1.0
Consent Warden is now officially out in the wild.
The Free edition has been released through WordPress.org, while Standard and Pro are available here on LinuxGnut. All three are at the beginning of what I expect will be a much longer development cycle.
I have plenty of ideas for where it goes next, but I also don’t want to turn it into the exact kind of bloated compliance platform that made me build it in the first place.
The goal remains pretty simple: make a good WordPress cookie consent plugin, make it do the technical part correctly, keep it lightweight, and charge based on the software you’re using rather than how many people happen to visit your website this month.
Seems reasonable enough.
Take a look at Consent Warden, grab the free version, or check out Standard and Pro if you need script blocking, Google Consent Mode v2, consent logging, cookie scanning, or geo-targeting.
And if you manage to break it in some particularly creative way, I suppose I’d like to hear about that too.