Cookie Policy
What is a cookie policy?
A cookie is a small text file that a website stores on your computer or mobile device when you visit the site. First party cookies are cookies set by the website you’re visiting. Only that website can read them. In addition, a website might potentially use external services, which also set their own cookies, known as third-party cookies.
Persistent cookies are cookies saved on your computer and that are not deleted automatically when you quit your browser, unlike a session cookie, which is deleted when you quit your browser. Every time you visit the Commission’s websites, you will be prompted to accept or refuse cookies.
What is a Cookie?
A cookie is a tiny piece of data stored on your computer and managed by your web browser at the request of a website. Cookies are very useful to a website because they help the website remember important things like what items you have in your shopping basket, what special offers you might be eligible for and whether you are logged in. They also help websites remember your preferences such as, for instance, whether you like to see prices including or excluding VAT.
Cookies are also used to help improve a website by using a unique (anonymous) value to help the site owner identify the most popular content, measure site performance and how often users visit. Websites often use services from other companies to help with this analysis and the cookies used by these other companies on the website owner’s behalf are called third-party cookies. Because cookies are managed by your web browser if you move to a different device or browser software the cookies won’t come along. You will need to log into a website again on your mobile device, for instance, even though you are logged in on your desktop computer already. Each device and web browser will have its own set of cookies that might be different.
Our Cookies
We classify the cookies we use on our websites based on what they do and whether they are essential to the working of the website. You can disable any or all of the cookies we use via your web browser preferences but disabling certain cookies will prevent our sites from offering functionality you want to use.
- Required cookies. Without these cookies some or all of our websites won’t work the way you expect. For instance, you won’t be able to log into your account or add items to your basket.
- Convenience cookies. Without these cookies you can still use our websites but you might miss out on special offers and you might not see personalisations you have made to your Control Panel.
- Analytical cookies. These cookies are not needed for you to use our sites but they do help us improve sites to make them easier to use and faster.
Third Party Cookies
Third-party cookies are cookies used by:
- Open Source software developed by the world-wide software community
- companies that provide products on our behalf
- companies we use that help us analysing how we can improve our websites
We use some Open Source software which is developed by a community and which is not owned or managed by any single company. These community projects don’t have their own cookie policies but their entire source code is available for public inspection.
Some of our products (such as our website building products) are supported by other companies which have their own cookies. These companies have their own cookie policies which we’ve linked to below. If you haven’t purchased products supported by these companies then you won’t have cookies on your device from them.
Cookie settings
You can control which cookies your web browser allows via the browser’s preferences. You may prevent (block) all cookies or just some but remember that some cookies are required for our websites to work. The third-party services we use support the ‘Do Not Track’ option in modern web browsers and modern web browsers also offer to block ‘Only third-party’ cookies. Enabling these options shouldn’t prevent you using our websites (please contact us if you experience problems and we will do our best to fix them). Most web browsers also support optional plugins that offer enhanced control over cookies. Remember, cookies are browser and device specific so you will need to set your cookie preferences in all your browsers and on all your devices separately.