RuralHealthConsentBanner

A free WordPress cookie consent banner built for rural hospitals, clinics, and other health care organizations. Built and maintained by visuaFUSION Systems Solutions, an IT Strategic Partner specializing exclusively in Rural Health Care organizations.

Why this exists

Rural hospitals and clinics are held to the same privacy expectations as the largest health systems. Website tracking and cookie consent is one of those areas where a small oversight can quietly turn into a large problem, and meeting the expectation should not require enterprise-sized resources.

This plugin exists so your organization can get it right without adding another vendor, another invoice, or another thing for your staff to babysit.

That is the same job we do every day. HealthNet member hospitals get enterprise-grade IT operations, security, and HIPAA-aligned processes sized for rural health care, so they avoid costly mistakes and keep more of their budget pointed at patient care. This plugin is a small, no-strings way to do the same thing for your website.

What it does

Most consent banners are decorative. They record which button you clicked and load the trackers either way. Open the developer tools on a site running one, refuse tracking, reload, and watch the requests still going out.

This one holds the scripts. Refuse, and no request leaves the browser.

• Loads nothing until a visitor allows it. Zero third-party requests before consent, which you can confirm yourself in the network panel.
• Supports Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity, X Pixel, LinkedIn Insight Tag, and Reddit Pixel out of the box.
• Asks per tracker rather than per category, so somebody can allow page counts and refuse session recording. Marketing pixels are grouped separately and refused by default.
• Only offers a visitor the trackers you have actually configured. A tracker with no ID is never mentioned, because there is no sense asking permission for something that is not installed.
• Withdrawing consent sends each vendor's own revocation signal and deletes the first-party cookies it set.
• Keeps trackers off pages you nominate, and off anyone who is signed in. Use it for contact forms, bill payment, and patient portal handoffs.
• Matches your theme's colors automatically, checking every pair against WCAG contrast and correcting anything that falls short. Or pick your own, with a live preview and a contrast readout on the settings screen.
• Full-width bar or floating panel; top, bottom, corner, or center; with a corner-rounding slider that the buttons follow.
• Footer link and a [rhcb_preferences] shortcode so visitors can change their mind later.

Accessibility and performance

• WCAG 2.2 AA. Zero axe violations, fully keyboard operable, and the bar never hides the control you just tabbed to.
• Zero cumulative layout shift. The banner is fixed and the page reserves the space it covers.
• Cache safe. The markup is identical for every visitor and the choice is read from a cookie before first paint, so a page cache can never serve one visitor's consent decision to another.
• No jQuery on the front end. Roughly 4 KB compressed, deferred.

Important: remove your other tracking plugins first

This plugin cannot switch off a tag that a different plugin put on the page. Site Kit by Google, the Microsoft Clarity plugin, MonsterInsights and similar all load their tag for every visitor as soon as they are connected. Leave one of them running and your visitors are still tracked after they decline, which is worse than having no banner at all, because the banner is then stating something that is not true.

Requirements

• WordPress 6.3 or later
• PHP 8.2 or later

Installation

From the WordPress admin

1. Download the latest release .zip from the Releases page.
2. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins, then Add New, then Upload Plugin.
3. Choose the .zip file and click Install Now.
4. Click Activate.

Manual

1. Download the latest release .zip and extract it.
2. Upload the ruralhealth-consent-banner folder to /wp-content/plugins/.
3. In your WordPress admin, go to Plugins and activate RuralHealthConsentBanner.

The folder inside the release .zip is the plugin. Upload it whole and do not strip it: WordPress finds a plugin by looking at the immediate children of /wp-content/plugins/ for a file with a plugin header, so without that folder there is nothing to find, and the failure is silent. The site keeps working and the plugin is simply absent.

Note that the source in this repository is laid out flat, at the repository root, which is what the wordpress.org deploy tooling expects. Cloning the repository is therefore not the same as installing it; use a release .zip, or rename your clone to ruralhealth-consent-banner.

Configuration

After activation, go to Settings, then Consent Banner.

1. Remove or disable any other tracking plugin, as above.
2. Switch on the trackers you use and paste each ID.
3. List the IDs of any pages that collect information, so no tracker runs on them at all.
4. Adjust the shape, placement, and colors. The preview updates as you go.
5. Edit the wording to sound like your organization.
6. Save, then load your site in a private window. Refuse tracking, open the developer tools, reload, and confirm nothing is going out to googletagmanager.com, clarity.ms, or an advertising domain.

A note on compliance

This plugin gives you the tools to collect and honor visitor consent. It does not decide for you which cookies and scripts your site should be running, and it is not a substitute for a review of your site's tracking technologies against the regulations that apply to your organization. If you are unsure what is running on your site, or whether it should be, that review is worth doing.

Nothing here is legal advice. Privacy and consent law differs by state and by country and changes often. If you are unsure what applies to your organization, ask your own counsel.

No warranty

This plugin is provided free of charge and as is, with no warranty of any kind, express or implied, including any implied warranty of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Installing it, configuring it, and deciding what to track are the responsibility of the site administrator. That includes acting on anything the plugin suggests, such as removing other tracking plugins. Check the result yourself before you rely on it.

visuaFUSION Systems Solutions accepts no liability for any effect on your website, for loss of data or of analytics history, for regulatory action, or for any claim or lawsuit arising from tracking on your website, however that tracking came to be running.

Support and contributions

Bug reports and feature requests are welcome through Issues.

Pull requests are not being accepted yet. Code merged without a contributor license agreement cannot be relicensed later, and that would foreclose options this project wants to keep open. A CLA is coming; until it is in place, please open an issue and we will talk through the approach.

About visuaFUSION

visuaFUSION Systems Solutions is a Nebraska-based IT partner serving rural health care organizations. Through HealthNet, member hospitals and clinics get a shared, fully managed IT environment designed around the realities of rural health care: enterprise-grade operations, security, and HIPAA-aligned processes without enterprise-sized overhead.

If your organization is carrying more IT and compliance weight than it should, see how HealthNet works.

License

This project is licensed under the Mozilla Public License 2.0. See the LICENSE file for the full text.

Every source file carries the standard MPL header. Exhibit B, the "Incompatible With Secondary Licenses" notice, is deliberately not applied to any file, because that notice is an opt-out that would destroy the GPL compatibility the wordpress.org plugin directory requires. Do not add it.

Copyright (c) 2026 visuaFUSION LLC.