About cookies

Nearly every website you visit will use cookies in some way to improve your user experience by enabling that website to remember you, either for the duration of your visit (using a session cookie) or for repeat visits (using a persistent cookie).

Cookies do a lot of different jobs, like helping you navigate between pages efficiently, storing your preferences, and generally improving your experience. Cookies can make the interaction between you and the website faster and easier. If a website doesnt use cookies, it will think you are a new visitor every time you move to a new page on the site  for example, when you enter your login details and move to another page it wont recognise you and it wont be able to keep you logged in.

Some websites will also use cookies to enable them to target their advertising or marketing messages based for example, on your location and/or browsing habits. Cookies may be set by the website you are visiting (first party cookies) or they may be set by other websites who run content on the page you are viewing (third party cookies).

What is in a cookie?

A cookie is not a type of biscuit, it is a simple text file that is stored on your computer or mobile device by a websites server and only that server will be able to retrieve or read the contents of that cookie. Each cookie is unique to your web browser. It will contain some anonymous information such as a unique identifier and the site name and some digits and numbers. It allows a website to remember things like your preferences or whats in your shopping basket.

What to do if you dont want cookies to be set


Opting out of cookies

