This site has no cookie bar

Notice anything missing? No popup asking you to “accept all cookies.” No banner eating 30% of your screen. No “legitimate interest” toggles buried three clicks deep. This site doesn’t have a cookie bar because it doesn’t use cookies.

Zero. Not “just essential cookies.” Not “anonymized tracking cookies.” Zero. The analytics run on Plausible, which counts visits without storing anything on your device. No fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking, no personal data collected. The entire payload is a single script under 1 KB. Compare that to Google Analytics, which drops half a dozen cookies, phones home to Mountain View, and requires a consent banner in every EU country by law.

The GDPR doesn’t require cookie consent for a site that doesn’t set cookies. That’s it. That’s the whole trick. You don’t need a Consent Management Platform. You don’t need OneTrust or Cookiebot or whatever SaaS costs $200/month to manage something that shouldn’t exist. You just… don’t track people.

The numbers still work. Plausible shows page views, referrers, countries, devices. Enough to know if a page is popular or dead. I don’t need to know your scroll depth or which button color converts 0.3% better. For a showcase site, aggregate traffic data is plenty.

The irony of most cookie banners is that they make the experience worse to collect data that nobody acts on. A 45-person startup running A/B tests on button colors through Google Optimize, paying for a consent platform, and annoying every single visitor. For what?

Skip all of it. Use privacy-friendly analytics. Ship a faster, cleaner site. Your visitors will never notice what’s missing, and that’s the point.