The European Union has tightened the rules for cookies collection consent

The GDPR panic ended within a month of the adoption of the law. Nevertheless, by the beginning of 2020, European companies and website owners were fined 114 million euros. At the same time, the number of law violations continues to grow. Regarding that, the European Data Protection Council (EDPB) has updated guidelines for cookies usage Let’s figure out what is the essence of new explanations.

1. Prohibited to notify about the use of cookies without the possibility to refuse their collection

The practice of “tacit consent”, which was actively used by websites, is no more satisfactory in the case of any law suite. Oops, it’s time to inform guys from Spotify about this.

2. Scrolling, swiping and other interactions with a website do not constitute consent

Therefore, any data collection from users who have not agreed to the use of cookies is strictly prohibited. The regulator emphasizes that any manipulations at the level of interaction, in any case, will be perceived as an offense of EDPB principles.

3.You can not prohibit access to the content to those who didn’t agree with the website’s Cookie Policy

No one can force the user to consent against its will. Access should be provided equally to all participants. The exceptions are cases when the functionality cannot be implemented without collecting data through cookies.

Why is this important?

By the beginning of the year, about 160,000 coolies policy violations were registered in the EU. In the year 2019, the trend of penalty number only grew, Add up to +12.6%, compared to the indicators of 2018, when the law has come into force. If your business interacts with users from the EU, you must comply with the EDPB requirements. At the moment, most part of the burden of the fines falls on the most progressive EU member states, like Great Britain, Netherlands, Germany, France, and Austria. The record holders for fines are still large networks and enterprises. But there is also a noticeable trend towards reducing the “threshold” for entering the “penalty club”. The situation is especially typical for the Netherlands. In this country, the number of notifications of violations is 147.2 per 100,000 of NL citizens.

Why a half of the Internet will use WordPress in 2022?

The information that next year WordPress can serve more than half of the Internet sites as a CMS is not a guess or an assumption, but a pure trend that the guys from W3Techs noticed a few years ago. At the moment, the share of WordPress among sites is 40% with an average growth of 5% every year (in 2019 it was 4%, in 2020-5%). Thus, by the end of next year, WordPress will be used by more than half of the site owners. Why?

WordPress is freedom. It is important to note that among other open-source products, the share is constantly decreasing, the only exception in this list is WP. For example, in January, Squarespace surpassed Drupal/Wix, becoming the fourth most popular CMS with a market share of 2.5%, get overpaid by Joomla (3.4%), Shopify (5.3%), and sure WordPress (64.3%).

The platform has a rich community.  At the moment there are more than 50,000 plugins that solve user problems. The most popular plugin is Woocommerce, which turns WordPress into an online store, which is functionality used by more than 20%. The CMS itself is translated into 57 languages (!). That is why in 2018, the share of WP installations in other languages exceeded the English version of the platform, which was most popular previously.

Easy updates of versions. If we take Opencart for comparison, it will become obvious – WordPress is the easiest to update and is more protected from the problems of older versions. For example. in the case of installed Opencart, clients sometimes cannot even update version 2. x to 3. x simply because of the features of the template. At the same time, there are no such problems in WordPress — at the moment, almost 88% of site owners use the latest version of the WP.

Easy working with different teams. WordPress has a clear and quickly learned code structure. Therefore, you can always quickly change the developer, connect a new engineer to the team and solve issues on the fly when the team does not even know each other. This allows you to reduce the risks that always exist when developing custom sites using custom technologies.

Skeptics only help platform growth. Working in the development market, we often hear skeptical comments about WordPress, mostly related to security issues. An interesting fact is that all skeptical remarks end as soon as we say that the White House website is assembled on WP. Interesting, isn’t it?

All this allows us to conclude that the share of WordPress will only increase in the nearest future. Therefore, if you are just thinking about how to implement your new idea and which platform to choose for this, write to us and we will be happy to advise you.