If you are looking to make your website comply with the laws that your country or area needs, you have come to the right place.
Here I will list all the best GDPR plugins you can use in your WordPress website. There are many good choices there, and I hope I help you find the right one for you.
However, if you are not sure you need to do this, it’s easy to answer this simple question: Are you collecting user’s data or not? If the answer is no, you have nothing to worry about, and you can leave this article immediately, but if the answer is yes or you intend to do it in the future, read the next parts carefully.
It’s essential that as a site owner, you do this thing because you are the one who owns it, and legal repercussions fall on you. Many things can go wrong if you choose to undermine the authorities, so just do these simple steps, and you don’t have to worry about it at all in the future.
What is GDPR?
The GDPR or General Data Protection Regulation is a regulation that was instated in 2016 for the European Union and the European Economic Area. It basically is a legal framework where there are a set of rules and guidelines that websites need to follow to collect and process personal information for individuals from the European Union.
Every major company or organization that deals with data processing in the entire world for a specific audience is EU residents need to comply with the regulations. Yeah, you read it correctly; you don’t need to be in Europe to comply with these regulations.
Let’s say you have an online store and you are from America, but this store has a main attraction to clients from the European Union. Do you still need to comply with the GDPR? The answer is obviously yes because to use an online store and to order, users need to reveal some sensitive information.
Due to the nature of the regulation, no one plugin can offer 100% compliance with GDPR, so you have to be mindful of the decisions you make on your website.
If you ever are in doubt and don’t know for sure how to handle a situation, I would suggest contacting an internet law attorney to put your mind to ease and have your website fully complies with the law.
Why Does it Matter?
Complying with the General Data Protection Regulation is essential nowadays since it improves and protects European subjects’ data. It helps organizations and companies that deal with data processing to secure individuals’ rights and data.
Every company in the world that has dealt with data relating to EU citizens had complied with the new and improved regulation. With the passing of the new GDPR in 2016, the standards of data privacy and security standards have significantly increased.
This regulation has made organizations in the whole world take a good look at their systems and improve them in many ways so that there are no more data breaches. Or at least if there are in the future, they did everything required by the new law to prevent it.
With the rising help of cybersecurity, any potential data leaks in the future will be detected much faster and even blocked before there is a leak, so good things are happening in this regard.
The Best GDPR WordPress Plugins
1. Cookie Notice for GDPR & CCPA
Cookie Notice for GDPR & CCPA is an excellent freeware plugin that makes a popup notification to ask for permission from the user to use cookies or not. This will significantly help you comply with the GDPR and the CCPA or California Consumer Privacy Act if you are also selling in America.
This plugin is heavily customizable, so that means you can include links in the popup, such as the privacy policy or the legal pages of your website. It’s also really SEO friendly so that your website’s index by the search engines doesn’t get affected by it.
To set up all of this stuff and many more that the plugin has to offer, it’s really not a hassle at all, and even a beginner can find its way when using it. For those of you who also use other plugins, such as the MonsterInsights, which I will discuss in the next section, this plugin integrates easily.
And as a matter of fact, it’s really compatible with a large number of plugins, so you will never have problems with this plugin, and that’s one of the reasons I think it’s excellent. As I said at the beginning of this section, this plugin is entirely free and doesn’t have a Premium version.
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2. MonsterInsights
MonsterInsights is one of the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress that does many things and will help you comply with the GDPR. It’s effortless to use and, many features are essential to site owners, such as the reports, adding Google Analytics tracking code, and many more.
This plugin makes it really simple to handle its users’ personal data, and you can even disable it at all. In the GDPR, you need to ask the user permission before collecting their information (such as the IP address).
MonsterInsights helps you with that too. With the add-on ‘MonsterInsights EU Compliance,’ you can even anonymize the data. Another important feature that many people look up to when searching for a GDPR plugin is how they handle the option to track data using the Google Analytics tool.
Well, this plugin will allow you to do that as long as you get consent from them. It’s a really straightforward and quick process that can be done with MonsterInsight, and you won’t get disappointed.
As I briefly mentioned earlier, this plugin is also compatible with the Cookie Notice plugin, a great feature. What this means is that the website will not load the analytics script until the user has given consent over the cookies or not.
You have to keep in mind, though, that there’s a price and this plugin is not exactly cheap with all these features and tools. MonsterInsights cost starts from 99.50$ a year, and this includes the EU Compliance addon that is needed.
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3. WPForms the GDPR Friendly Contact Forms
If you have forms on your website, and let’s face it, almost every website nowadays has formed, then you need to take a look at the WPForms plugin. With this plugin, you can create all kinds of forms that you can imagine and need for your website, and the best part about it is that it has built-in GDPR compliance.
Setting up the forms with the compliance aspects is really simple; you just need to go to settings and tick a box that says ‘GDPR Enhancements.’ Once this feature is enabled, WPForms will not collect the IP addresses on all of your available forms on your website.
There’s also a GDPR extra option that will disable user tracking cookies and storing user details such as the browser or the operating system. Depending on your situation, you will need to enable or disable this feature, but it’s good to know that this plugin offers it in the first place.
I mentioned before that all the forms will be made GDPR compliant once you turn on that option, but if you want to do only individual forms, you can totally do it. It’s just another option that you can easily find in the settings of the plugin.
WPForms has a free version with some of the GDPR compliance options, but if you want all of them, you can choose the premium version, which will cost you only 39.50$ a year.
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4. GDPR Cookie Consent
The GDPR Cookie Consent plugin will help you make your website or organization comply with the data processing laws. Not only the GDPR but also CCPA, LGPD, and many more. This plugin has many cool features that might be useful for you and make your website look good while taking consent for cookies.
It allows you to display an alert bar on your website with ‘Accept’ and ‘Reject’ options highlighted so that the user can choose easily. Customization is effortless and straightforward with this plugin.
You can make the cookie notice bar any color you want, position it anywhere on your website, and choose your own styles and fonts. Literally, you can make it look like it’s integrated into your theme so that it isn’t an eyesore to your website’s general visitor.
This plugin needs to be slightly tweaked to work correctly, as it can break your website if you choose to block all the cookies. It’s a simple step that can be quickly done in the settings of the plugin.
You can get this plugin for free, but there’s also a Premium version that costs 49$ a year, which will give you even more options and tools.
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5. OptinMonster
OptinMonster is a powerful plugin and one of the best in the world for popup creation and lead generation. It has tools that let you create anything from email newsletter signup forms, drag and drop popup maker, pre-built templates to boost conversations, and many more.
With this plugin, every form that you want is going to be GDPR compliant. It’s effortless to add a privacy policy field and make the user submit only after they have agreed to the policy.
If you don’t want to show it to every visitor, there is an option that offers the regulation based on which country you are visiting from, which is really useful.
Another great tool is for organizations that get audited for GDPR compliance, OptinMonster has a team specifically for this. They have a GDPR Audit Concierge team that will assist you anytime since their customer support is excellent and always there for you.
You have several options with this plugin, but the base one will cost you 9$ each month. If you want the geolocation feature, you will need the growth plan, which costs 49$ a month.
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Final Thoughts
As I explained in this article, complying with the GDPR is really important, and as a site or business owner that deals with data processing, you should take a good look at this. It can definitively have a significant impact on your organization, and there are consequences if the regulation is not adequately used.
However, many plugins and tools can help make your life easier, as I have explained thoroughly in this article. You can never be too sure about whether your website is entirely GDPR compliant so take a good look at all the plugins I mentioned and find the right one that works for your venture.
If anything is in the gray area and you don’t want to risk being a lawful website, then talking to the attorney for internet law is the safest thing you can do. For whatever questions you might have regarding GDPR or any of the plugins shown in this article, don’t hesitate to leave a comment down below, and I will answer every one of them.
