Cookie Policy for BabyEssentials.org.uk
Last Updated: July 1, 2025
1. What are Cookies?
Cookies are small text files that are placed on your computer or mobile device when you visit a website. They are widely used to make websites work more efficiently, as well as to provide information to the owners of the site. Cookies can remember your preferences, help analyse website performance, and enable certain functionalities.
Cookies can be “persistent” or “session” cookies:
- Persistent cookies remain on your personal computer or mobile device when you go offline, until they expire or are manually deleted.
- Session cookies are deleted as soon as you close your web browser.
2. How We Use Cookies
BabyEssentials.org.uk uses cookies for various purposes:
- To ensure the proper functioning of our Website, Essential cookies are necessary for the Website to operate correctly.
- To understand how you use our Website, we use analytics cookies to collect information about how visitors interact with our Website, which pages they visit, and what links they click on. This helps us improve our Website’s performance and design.
- To remember your preferences: Functional cookies may remember choices you make (e.g., your login details if you’re an administrator/editor, or your cookie consent preferences).
- To facilitate comments: If you leave a comment on our site, you may opt in to saving your name, email address, and website in cookies for your convenience, so that you do not have to fill in your details again when you leave another comment.
3. Types of Cookies We Use
Our Website may use the following types of cookies:
- Strictly Necessary Cookies:
- Purpose: These cookies are essential for you to browse the Website and use its features, such as accessing secure areas. Without these cookies, services like user logins (for administrators/editors) or commenting functionality cannot be provided. They are typically set in response to actions made by you, such as logging in or filling out forms.
- Examples: WordPress session cookies for logged-in users.
- Legal Basis (GDPR): Legitimate interest (for the functioning of the website).
- Analytical / Performance Cookies:
- Purpose: These cookies collect information about how visitors use our Website (e.g., which pages are most popular, how much time is spent on a page, sources of traffic). This data helps us to improve the way our Website works. We use Google Analytics for this purpose.
- Provider: Google Analytics
- Legal Basis (GDPR): Consent (via our cookie consent banner). These cookies are only placed if you provide consent.
- Functionality Cookies:
- Purpose: These cookies allow the Website to remember choices you make (such as your language or region) and provide enhanced, more personal features. For example, if you leave a comment, a cookie may save your details so you don’t have to re-enter them next time.
- Examples: WordPress comment cookies.
- Legal Basis (GDPR): Consent (for user-specific preferences) or Legitimate Interest (where integral to a user-requested feature).
- Third-Party Cookies:
- Purpose: These cookies are set by third-party services that may appear on our Website, such as embedded content (e.g., YouTube videos, social media feeds, if applicable) or security/spam detection services (e.g., Akismet). They may be used by these third parties to track your online activity across different websites for various purposes, including advertising.
- Examples: Cookies set by YouTube if a video is embedded, or by Akismet for spam filtering.
- Legal Basis (GDPR): Consent (for non-essential third-party cookies).
4. Managing Your Cookie Preferences
You have the right to decide whether to accept or reject cookies. You can manage your cookie preferences through:
- Our Cookie Consent Banner: When you first visit our Website, or at any time by clicking the [usually a small icon or link in the footer/sidebar] “Cookie Settings” or “Manage Consent” link, you can review and adjust your preferences for different categories of cookies.
- Your Web Browser Settings: Most web browsers allow you to control cookies through their settings preferences. You can usually find these settings in the “Options” or “Preferences” menu of your browser. Disabling cookies entirely may affect the functionality of many websites, including ours.
- For Chrome: Chrome cookie settings help
- For Firefox: Firefox cookie settings help
- For Edge: Edge cookie settings help
- For Safari: Safari cookie settings help
5. Changes to This Cookie Policy
We may update our Cookie Policy from time to time. We will notify you of any changes by posting the new Cookie Policy on this page and updating the “Last Updated” date at the top. You are advised to review this Cookie Policy periodically for any changes.
6. Contact Us
If you have any questions about this Cookie Policy, your data, or would like to exercise your data protection rights, please contact us:
- By visiting our Contact Page.