Alligator Design
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Nothing to accept

There is no cookie banner on this site. Not because the law was ignored, but because the law was read: the banner is not the rule, it is the receipt for something the site chose to do. This site does not do it.

October 2026

European rules do not say “every website must ask permission”. They say that before you store something on a visitor’s device that is not strictly needed to deliver the page, you have to ask, and the asking has to be free, informed and as easy to refuse as to accept. Storing nothing means asking nothing. The banner is not compliance; it is a confession.

That is why they arrived all at once. The web did not suddenly become more polite in 2018 — it had already become an advertising network with pages attached, and the banner is the paperwork for that arrangement, pushed forward onto the one person in the transaction who never asked for any of it.

What the banner actually costs

It taxes every single visit. The first thing a new reader meets is not your work but a decision about your suppliers, taken under mild duress, in a modal that covers the thing they came for. Some of them leave there. Nobody ever tells you.

The banner is not compliance. It is a receipt for a choice you did not have to make.

It is often a barrier. Banners are frequently built by the same people who build the tracking, which shows: focus that jumps to nowhere, a “reject” that cannot be reached with the keyboard, contrast that fails, text at nine pixels, a dialog that traps a screen reader in a loop. A visitor who cannot dismiss it cannot use the site at all.

Much of it is not even lawful. Consent buried under “manage preferences”, “accept” in colour and “refuse” in grey, boxes pre-ticked, and a list of several hundred partners sharing something called a legitimate interest. In 2022 the Belgian data protection authority found the consent framework behind most of these banners to be in breach of the rules. The banners did not go away. They got taller.

And it buys almost nothing for a small site. The numbers that a tracker delivers — bounce rates, session lengths, heat maps — rarely change a decision anybody was actually going to take. A one-person business does not need to know that 63% of mobile readers scrolled past the second heading. It needs to know whether the phone rings.

What puts one there in the first place

Almost nobody adds tracking on purpose. It arrives with the furniture, and each of these is enough to need a banner, a notice, or both:

  • an analytics script, however harmless it sounds;
  • a video embedded straight from a video platform, which starts watching before anything is played;
  • an embedded map, a social feed, a share button, a hosted chat bubble, a spam-catcher on a form;
  • fonts loaded from somebody else’s server — no cookie, but every visitor’s address handed to a third party;
  • a plugin whose description said “speed” and whose business is data.

None of it is necessary to have a fast, findable, good-looking website. All of it is the default, because the default was designed by companies that sell attention.

How you end up with nothing to ask about

Host what the page needs. Fonts, images, scripts, styles: on your own domain. Nothing external loads, so nothing external learns anything.

Count visits at the server, not in the browser. Your host already logs every request, and a search console shows you which words brought people in. That is roughly everything a small site can act on, and it needs no script and no consent.

Link out instead of embedding in. A still image and a link to the video, a static map with an address beside it, a plain link to the social account. If a real embed is worth it, load it only after the reader clicks — then they chose, which is what consent was supposed to mean.

Publish an address instead of a form. No form, no spam-catcher, no third-party script guarding it — and the visitor keeps a copy of what they wrote.

What remains is the handful of cookies a website may set to do its job: keeping you logged in, remembering what you typed into a comment. Those are strictly necessary, they need no permission, and they are named on the privacy page like everything else.

The quiet advantage

A site with nothing to accept is faster, because half the weight of an average page is other people’s code. It is easier to keep accessible, because the worst offender is usually the consent dialog. It ages better, because there is no supplier to be bought, broken or blocked. And it says something to the reader without a word of copy: nobody is watching you here.

That is worth more than a graph of bounce rates. It is also, unlike the banner, actually true.

Read the originals

The first one is the judgment that decided what consent has to look like. The rest is what happens when nobody intends to comply.