Cookie Consent Banners: Good vs. Bad Examples

Introduction

Have you ever found yourself in a situation where upon landing on a website you need to wrestle with a pop-up in order to get access to just one article? This is the type of banner you hate. What about clicking “Reject” and moving on in less than 2 seconds without giving it a second thought? This is the type of banner you love.

I’ve put much effort into analyzing such banners, auditing them for my clients, trying different industries and seeing how they cope with making the same choice. It turns out that there is a definite pattern in this. Good banners respect your time and choice. Poor ones do not have other options but to make you say yes.

Here is an easy to understand guide to understanding the difference between them, with examples, comparisons and the answers to the most frequently asked questions.

What Is a Cookie Consent Banner, Really?

That’s the pop-up window that asks if the website can track your activities through the use of cookies, little bits of information that keep track of things such as your login details, your shopping cart, or the advertisements that you’ve clicked elsewhere.

If a website is based in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or somewhere like California, it’s legally obligated to ask permission before tracking anything more than what’s necessary. But just because something’s legally obligated to happen doesn’t mean it has to be annoying.

Good Cookie Banner Examples

1. There are two equally sized buttons labeled “Accept” and “Reject” next to each other; both buttons carry equal weight in terms of color and visibility. After choosing one option, the banner will disappear, and you’ll be free to continue browsing the website. No maze, no manipulative guilt, no need to read any extra lines in the fine print.

2. Instead of some abstract statement like “We use cookies to improve your user experience,” there should be an exact explanation of what this banner means: “We use cookies for analysis and advertising personalization. You may disable these features below.”

3. “Set it once” banner Once you’ve decided how you feel about cookies and made a choice, this decision will be remembered. The banner won’t keep appearing on each new page and each new visit that is the absolute minimum people would expect when making any setting choices.

4. Footer settings link A little link such as “Cookie Settings” or “Privacy Preferences” is kept in the footer all the time. Should you regret your acceptance of cookie tracking after six months, you won’t have to clean your browser history. Just click the link, and that’s it.

5. Layered banner One of the best solutions includes having a short first layer (“We use cookies – accept, reject, or customize”), and an advanced settings pane only when needed. It helps those users who need to decide quickly and those who need detailed settings, without making anyone go through the unnecessary steps.

Bad Cookie Banner Examples

1. The guilt-trip banner The “Accept All” button is large, prominent, and blue. The option to reject, on the other hand, is a small, grey text that goes something like “No thanks, I don’t want to save money.” The technique is even referred to by the design community as confirmshaming, which is quite accurate.

2. The maze banner Acceptance requires one click. Rejection entails opening a settings menu and clicking on ten different toggles to reject cookies one-by-one, and then finding a “Save Preferences” button somewhere in the bottom half of the screen. It’s an exercise in making rejection more difficult to achieve than acceptance.

3. The wall banner It isn’t possible to see anything from the website including the homepage until one accepts the cookies. There’s no preview and no access to a portion of the site before accepting cookies – all one sees is a locked interface. It’s known as a cookie wall, and has been deemed by several European regulators as not valid consent.

4. Repeat Offender Banner You don’t accept cookies, but they keep appearing on the banner on your next visit. And the one after that. In the end, people just get tired of seeing them and accept them out of exhaustion; that is exactly the result they were designed to yield.

5. Pre-Cheched Banner Check boxes for “marketing cookies” and “data sharing with third parties” are already checked by default even before you look at the screen. People would need to see them and uncheck them manually; however, it is unlikely that anyone would take this much effort, which is why this type of banner continues to exist.

6. Legalese Banner A long passage of compliance statements without any explanation. It means that if you need to get law education to understand the terms, then the banner has done nothing but fail at its sole purpose: to inform you.

Quick Comparison

What You See	Good Sign	Bad Sign
Accept vs Reject buttons	Same size, same visibility	Accept is huge, Reject is tiny or hidden
Clicks needed to say no	One click	Multiple menus and toggles
Checkboxes	Empty by default	Pre-checked for you
Wording	Plain and specific	Vague, like “improve your experience”
Repeats	Remembers your choice	Shows up again and again
Page access	You can browse while deciding	Site is fully blocked until you choose
Settings access	Always available in footer	Buried, hard to find, or missing entirely

Why Good Cookie Banner Design Matters

It is not simply a question of aesthetics, but one of actual legal consequences. European regulators have levied fines against companies whose cookie banners have made “reject” harder to see or click than “accept”. This is not simply an incidental problem; this is the whole purpose of consent laws. When it takes five times the effort to reject something as it does to accept, then consent was never even remotely voluntary in the first place.

Putting the legal implications aside for a moment, banner design determines the first impression of a brand at its very core. A banner that respects the user’s choice, even if it isn’t the choice the company “wants”, creates some amount of goodwill before the customer has even read any other content on the website. A banner which coerces or tires out the user creates exactly the opposite impression; people will remember the experience, if not why they don’t trust the website.

Finally, there is also a business side to it. After redesigning their banners in response to regulatory pressure, companies tend to discover that consent rates do not plummet anywhere near as much as they feared.

Cookie Banner Best Practices Checklist

• A Simple List of Essentials If You’re Building a Banner Yourself
• Here’s a list of essentials if you’re building a cookie banner on your site yourself:
• Make sure that the “Accept” and “Reject” buttons are equally noticeable, in the same place, and require an equal amount of clicks.
• Don’t write the explanation in legalese, but as if you’re speaking directly to the user.
• Leave all unnecessary categories unchecked by default.
• Include an options page link always accessible from somewhere consistent, like the bottom of the page.
• Unless absolutely necessary, do not block access to the site entirely if the user doesn’t consent.
• Remember the decision the user made, and don’t ask them again every time.

CONCLUSION

In addition to complying with the privacy rules, a properly designed cookie consent banner can also build trust among your visitors. Offering your users options, blocking any unnecessary cookies until consent is obtained, and maintaining consent information will make your website more in line with privacy laws such as the GDPR, CCPA/CPRA, and others. If you have any tracking cookies on your website for analytics, advertisements, or other purposes, then having a cookie consent solution can be beneficial for you.

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