The Cookie Consent plugin helps you maintain an accurate and up-to-date inventory of all cookies and scripts on your website. This is achieved through a scanning process that detects and categorizes these items, providing you with a detailed report.
How Cookie Scanning Works
Cookie scanning automates the discovery of cookies and scripts, which is crucial for compliance. It ensures you know exactly what tracking technologies are on your site, allowing you to categorize them correctly and block non-compliant scripts until consent is given.
Scan Types
Cookie Consent offers different scanning options:
- Full Scan: Automatically crawls your entire website. The number of pages scanned may be limited based on your subscription plan.
- Custom Scan: Allows you to specify particular URLs to scan.
Scan Configuration
You can configure advanced options to include or exclude specific URL patterns. This is useful for skipping administrative areas or targeting particular sections of your site.
Scan Process
During a scan, a progress indicator shows the number of pages scanned. For full scans, you have the option to stop the process mid-way. Credits are used based on the number of pages scanned.
How to perform a scan with Cookie Consent
Note: You are prompted to perform a scan when you first install Cookie Consent. We highly recommend you run this initial scan.
To perform a scan:
- Navigate to the Cookie Consent dashboard.
- Select the Cookie Management tab.
- Click Scan now.
- Choose your desired scan type:
- Homepage: Only scans your homepage.
- Full Scan: Scan your entire site.
If performing a Full scan, you can click Exclude URL to not scan selected pages. - Custom Scan: Only scans selected pages.
If performing a Custom Scan, enter the specific URLs you wish to scan.
- Click Scan now to initiate the scan.
Understanding Scan Results
After a scan is complete, you receive a summary of the findings.
Scan Results Summary
The summary provides an overview of the scan, including:
- Scan status: Indicates whether the scan was successful, partial (stopped or quota exceeded), or failed.
- Number of pages scanned.
- Credits consumed.
- Cookies found per category: Cookies are automatically categorized into Necessary, Functional, Analytics, and Advertisement.
- Scripts detected.
- Any errors encountered: Such as unreachable pages or missing quota.
Scan History
The plugin maintains a log of all previous scans. This history includes the date, status, pages scanned, and items found for each scan. This log serves as an audit trail for compliance purposes.