Why doesn't this website ask you to accept cookies?

The short answer: a cookie banner exists to ask your permission to put something on your device and keep it there. This website doesn't put anything there. There is nothing to ask you about, so we don't interrupt you to ask it.

That's the whole reason. It isn't a clever trick and it isn't a loophole — it's just a consequence of building the site small. What follows is the longer version, because "we don't use cookies" is a sentence any website can type, and you should know what to check rather than take our word for it.

One thing up front: we build websites, we are not lawyers, and nothing here is legal advice. This page describes how this site is built and why. What your own business is required to do depends on your situation, and that's a question for someone qualified to answer it.

1. What a cookie actually is

A cookie is a small piece of text a website asks your browser to save on your device. The next time you visit, your browser hands it back, and the site recognises you.

Plenty of them are useful and completely ordinary. The cookie that keeps you logged in so you don't retype your password on every page is a cookie. So is the one that remembers what's in your shopping cart, or that you asked for the French version of a page. Nobody sensible objects to those.

The ones people object to do something different: they let a company recognise the same person across many different websites, building a picture of what you read and buy so ads can follow you around. That's the part the boxes are really about — and it's why the word "cookie" ended up sounding sinister when the technology itself is about as sinister as a coat-check ticket.

2. So why does nearly every website show a banner?

Because privacy rules in a number of places — Europe most famously, and increasingly elsewhere — expect people to be told what a website stores on their device and, for anything beyond what's strictly needed to run the site, to be asked first. Most websites use tools that store something, so most websites ask. The banner became a default, and now it appears on plenty of sites that arguably don't need one at all.

A banner is not a fault, and its absence is not a badge. If a business genuinely runs advertising campaigns, a logged-in customer area, or an online store, it will have cookies, and a clear consent banner is the right and honest thing to put in front of you. We'd build one. The interesting question was never "banner or no banner" — it's what's underneath it.

3. What this site actually does — the complete version

Here is everything that runs when you open a page on manifestingnorth.com. Not the flattering summary — the list.

No cookies. None at all. Nothing this site sends asks your browser to store a cookie, and nothing writes to your browser's other storage either. If you're technical: open your browser's developer tools, look at the Application tab, and you'll find it empty. If you're not: there's simply nothing there to look at.

One counter, and we'll name it. We do want to know whether anyone reads these pages, so the site runs a single analytics script — Vercel Analytics, built into the company that hosts our site, loaded from our own address at /_vercel/insights/. It records that a page was viewed and, where your browser offers it, which site you arrived from. It sets no cookie and stores nothing on your device. That is the entire feature: a tally of pages, not a profile of people. We'd rather tell you it's there than let you find it.

No advertising, retargeting, or session recording. There is no ad network on this site, no social-media pixel, no tag manager, no chat widget, and nothing recording your mouse movements or replaying your visit. Not as a policy position — they were simply never added.

The fonts come from Google, and we'll be straight about that. The typefaces on this page load from Google's free font service, which means your browser does make a request to another company's servers to fetch them. Those requests set no cookies, but they are a request to someone else, and a page claiming total independence while quietly loading fonts from elsewhere would be exactly the sort of half-truth this guide is against. Fonts can be served from the site's own address instead, which removes that request entirely — it's a build choice, and one we're happy to make for anyone who asks.

The contact form sends what you typed, when you press send. Our contact page hands your message to a form-delivery service so it reaches our inbox. Nothing leaves your browser until you press the button, and what's sent is what you wrote — nothing collected in the background.

That's the list. Six paragraphs, and four of them are things we don't do. Most websites would need considerably more.

Questions to ask about your own website — any builder, including us

You don't need to understand any of the technology to ask these. Copy them into an email. Clear answers in plain language are the real credential.

1. Does my website set any cookies? If so, which ones, and what does each one do?
2. What scripts load on every page of my site, and whose are they?
3. Does my analytics tool use cookies, or is there a version that doesn't?
4. If my site shows a consent banner, does clicking "reject" actually stop anything?
5. Is there anything on my site — an ad pixel, a widget, a tracker — that I didn't ask for?
6. If my business does need consent, who is responsible for getting that right, you or me?

Question 5 is the one that surprises people most often. Scripts get added to websites over the years — by a marketing contractor, a plugin, a campaign that ran once in 2019 — and then nobody removes them. It's rarely anyone acting badly. It's just that no one was ever asked.

The bottom line: the banner isn't the point. What's running on your website is the point, and you're entitled to a plain-language list of it from whoever built the thing. If you get that list and it's short, you probably don't need a banner. If it's long, you probably do — and either way you'll finally know which. Again: we build websites, not legal opinions. What we can tell you is what's on your site. What we can tell you about the North, sourced line by line →