Cookies
If you use cookies or any type of tracking method on your website, you need to ask consent. EU and a handful of other countries require you to do so.
What are cookies?
Many websites need cookies to function properly. With cookies, browsers remember the content of a shopping cart, user language selection and store login status. Cookies are also used to collect data about the user and their behavior.
Tracking
Tracking cookies see user behavior like clicks, search history, device information, location and much more. They can also follow user from one website to another. These are installed by Google, Facebook or another marketing company. Marketers build profiles from this information. This data is valuable and is sold forward. Advertisers buy this data to target ads.
Law
Laws are quite clear on tracking cookies. You can track, but only with consent. Law requires you to tell what cookies are used and what for. You can track after user has given consent, not just tell that we are tracking.
Cookies are not the only method to track. Marketing folks are creative and have range of methods to track users all the time. No matter the method, you need to ask consent.
Don’t track
Problem with tracking cookies is that people don't know, or understand that these cookies follow them around and your information is being sold. Most people won't be fine with that. It also hurts customer trust.
Best practice is to not install tracking cookies and not track your visitors at all. You don't need to identify users to see usage data for your website. Everything is overanalyzed on a web. Plausible is good option for Google Analytics. You can see the basic data without cookies and users are not identified.
Cookie popups
People hate cookie popups on websites and try to close them as fast as possible. Popups destroy web experience and make the web worse place. Many cookie handling tools are not set properly and track you anyways.
If you still need to ask cookie consent on WordPress, LuckyWP Cookie Notice is a simple and lightweight plugin to use. Users don’t need too many options. It looks ugly, but is easy to customize with CSS. On WordPress UI you can add scripts that are added after consent is given.