External Content Consent

External Content Consent helps you comply with privacy regulations by requesting user consent before loading external content such as YouTube or Vimeo videos. The plugin blocks embeds until the user agrees, displays a customizable consent overlay, and can integrate with popular cookie consent plugins.

To protect your site visitors’ privacy, video thumbnails are saved directly to your local WordPress Media Library. The thumbnail is automatically downloaded from YouTube or Vimeo only when a logged-in administrator accesses the page. This ensures that while downloading the thumbnails only the administrator’s IP address is sent to the video service, never your visitors’.

Features:

• Blocks YouTube and Vimeo embeds until user consent is given
• Customizable overlay text, colors, and opacity
• Optionally shows a link to your Privacy Policy
• Downloads YouTube and Vimeo video thumbnails for a better user experience
• Integrates with Webtoffee GDPR Cookie Consent plugin
• Compatible with WordPress block editor and classic editor
• Compatible with Polylang/WPML and .po/.mo for translations
• Lightweight and easy to use

Installation

1. In the admin for your WordPress site, click on “Add New Plugin” in the “Plugins” menu.
2. Then click “Upload Plugin” button next to “Add Plugins” title.
3. Choose the external-content-consent.zip you downloaded after the purchase
4. Click “Install Now” button
5. After the installation finishes – Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress.
6. Go to Settings > External Content Consent to configure options and enter your license key.

Settings

• Plugin license key. Enter your license key
• Group Block background color (HEX color code). Enter a HEX color code to set the background color for the group container block. Group block is shown on the top of the video thumbnail and for non-video embeds there is only the group block. For example, #FFFFFF for white or #F5F5F5 for a light gray.
• Video thumbnail overlay opacity (0.0 – 1.0). Set the transparency of the color overlay on the video thumbnail. Use a value from 0.0 (completely transparent) to 1.0 (completely solid). A good starting point is 0.7.
• Video thumbnail overlay color (HEX color code). Choose the color for the overlay that appears on top of the video thumbnail. Enter a HEX color code, such as #000000 for black.
• Video thumbnail overlay text color (HEX color code). Choose the color for the text shown on top of the video overlay. Enter a HEX color code, like #FFFFFF for white, to ensure it’s readable.
• Show Privacy Policy link. Enable a link to your site’s Privacy Policy within the consent message. Note: Your Privacy Policy page must be set under Settings > Privacy in WordPress.
• Enable plugins CSS styles. Keep this enabled to use the plugin’s default styling. Disable it if you are a developer and want to apply your own custom CSS from your theme’s stylesheet.
• Integrate with Webtoffee GDPR Cookie Consent Plugin. Enable this to connect with the ‘GDPR Cookie Consent’ plugin by Webtoffee. When active, our plugin will respect the “functional” cookies consent given through Webtoffee’s main cookie banner for a seamless visitor experience. If “functional” cookies are accepted, all video embeds are loaded automatically from YouTube / Vimeo.
• Download thumbnails for existing content. This tool will scan all your posts, pages, and custom post types to find YouTube and Vimeo videos and process them. This is useful for downloading thumbnails for existing content. The process may take several minutes depending on the amount of content on your site.

How to use

• The plugin automatically protects blocks like YouTube-block and Vimeo-block and classic iframe embeds.
• Use the [ add-consent ]...[ /add-consent ] shortcode to wrap any embed code and ask for user consent.
• Customize frontend appearance and behavior in the plugin settings: Settings > External Content Consent .

Translations

Currently, the plugin is translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Swedish and Finnish. You can easily add your own language with the steps below.

Option 1: Install Loco Translate plugin to translate the strings

1. Install Loco Translate plugin to your website
2. Open Loco Translate > Plugins
3. Click “External Content Consent” on the “Translate plugins” list
4. Add your missing language and translate the English strings to your language

Option 2: Create and translate your own .po and .mo files e.g. with Poedit (Visit external site. The link opens in a new tab.)

1. Find Your “Locale Code”
This is the standard code for your language and region.

For German (Germany), it is de_DE.

For French (France), it is fr_FR.

You can find a complete list on the official WordPress translation teams page (Visit external site. The link opens in a new tab.).

The file names MUST follow this exact format:
external_content_consent-[locale_code].po
external_content_consent-[locale_code].mo

e.g for French:
external_content_consent-fr_FR.po
external_content_consent-fr_FR.mo

2. Upload your own .po and .mo files

1. Navigate to your WordPress installation’s /wp-content/ directory e.g. with FileZilla FTP program.
2. Look for a folder named languages. If it doesn’t exist, create it.
3. Inside the languages folder, look for a folder named plugins. If it doesn’t exist, create it.
4. Upload your two correctly named files (.po and .mo) into this /wp-content/languages/plugins/ directory.

Warning: Avoid This Location DO NOT upload your files to /wp-content/plugins/[plugin-name]/languages/. While translations can work from this folder, the entire plugin directory is overwritten and deleted when the plugin is updated, and you will lose your custom translation files.

Frequently Asked Questions