Optiweb

Cookies, these small bits of data, have gone from being a convenience to a controversy in recent years, mostly because of privacy concerns.

If you’re wondering why we don’t just stop using them, the answer is simple: they play a crucial role in the functionality of the web.

So let’s discuss some of their pros and how to overcome their cons.

Cookies Pros

Personalized User Experience:

Cookies enable websites to remember user preferences, such as language selection, theme choices (dark mode/light mode), or font size, for a more tailored browsing experience.

Session Management:

They store session information (such as remembering items added to a shopping cart), allowing users to stay logged in even when navigating across multiple pages or returning to the site after a break.

Performance Optimization:

With cookies, websites can load faster by storing cached preferences or previously loaded resources.

Analytics & Campaign Optimization:

They help target your audience with the right offers and information throughout their buyer journey.

Cookies Cons

Privacy & Security Risks:

Third-party cookies allow advertisers and analytics platforms to track user activity across different websites.

This builds detailed user profiles but also raises significant privacy concerns, which can even lead to legal consequences. To some extent, this can be mitigated by using first-party cookies. Using first-party cookies doesn’t automatically resolve these issues, as it depends on the type of data collected and how it is shared. Data collected using first-party cookies can quickly become third-party data.

Data Overload:

Storing unnecessary or excessive data in cookies can slow down browser performance and increase storage requirements. To fix this, set clear expiration dates for cookies to ensure they don’t accumulate indefinitely and store only essential information in them.

Bad User Experience:

The constant barrage of cookie consent pop-ups can disrupt the user experience, particularly when sites make it difficult to decline non-essential cookies. The solution is to make cookie consent pop-ups clear, concise, and easy to interact with.

With the phase-out of third-party cookies in some browsers, key functionalities like shopping carts may be affected, especially when there is more than one domain in the user journey (e.g., an e-commerce checkout being on a different domain). React quickly if you see that some browsers or devices are having bad performance.

So, yes: cookies may be small…

…but their impact is huge. That is—if they’re used wisely.

Please also be aware that cookies within the scope of web analytics are just a technology for tracking. Even if you don’t use cookies, you may violate the users’ privacy in a big way. Conversely, you may use many cookies without any cookie consent banner and be totally in line with the law. You should mention them in the cookie policy, though. In the end, it all depends on what data the cookie contains and how it is used and shared further down the road.

And don’t ever, ever forget: GDPR and other privacy-related legislations are all about user privacy and especially personal data, and not about cookies as some may want you to believe.