Every consent banner is a tax on the first impression, and most company websites pay it for numbers nobody looks at. Here is how we decide, and why this site runs without one.

The rule that actually matters

The cookie rules are not about cookies. They are about storing or reading anything on the visitor’s device that is not strictly necessary for the service they asked for. A tracking identifier that follows one person across visits needs consent. Counting that a page was viewed does not.

So the question is not “analytics or no analytics”. It is: do you need to recognise the same person twice?

Cookieless, aggregate analytics (Cloudflare Web Analytics, Plausible, Fathom and similar) will tell you:

  • page views and unique visitors per page, estimated without storing an identifier;
  • referrers, so you know which post or listing sent people;
  • countries and devices, in aggregate;
  • Core Web Vitals, so you notice when a page gets slow.

For a company site whose job is “be findable, explain what we do, get the right people to write in”, that is the whole list of questions worth answering.

What you give up

  • Funnels across sessions. You cannot see that the same visitor read a post on Monday and sent the form on Thursday.
  • Ad attribution. Paid campaigns want a conversion tied to a click. That needs an identifier, and with it a banner.
  • Product analytics. Inside an app, where users have accounts and you need to know which onboarding step loses people, the calculus is different, and consented analytics earn their keep.

Our decision rule

Run the site cookieless by default. Add consented analytics only when you can name the decision you will make with the extra data, and the money that decision moves. “It would be nice to know” is not a decision.

If you do add the heavier kind, do it properly: default everything to denied until the visitor accepts, offer decline and accept with equal weight, and let people withdraw consent as easily as they gave it. A banner where “reject” is a grey link and “accept” is a big green button is a pattern regulators have singled out by name.

What this site does

The pages you are reading set no cookies and store nothing in your browser. The contact form and the newsletter signup send exactly what you type, protected by a bot check that does not track you. That is why there is no banner, and why the privacy policy is short enough to read.