How to Become GDPR-Compliant: Guide for Website Owners

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is an EU data privacy law that regulates the way websites should handle personal data of their visitors. Based on Art. 3 GDPR, the regulation applies to any organization that offers goods or services to EU/EEA residents and monitors their behavior. Thus, if your website can be found online and be visited by EU residents, you need to introduce GDPR compliance to respect their rights to data privacy.

This article has been reviewed by our data protection experts and reflects requirements in force as of August 2026.

How to Comply With GDPR: Website Compliance vs Full Organizational Compliance

GDPR compliance for websites lies within the scope of the broader privacy compliance program, or an all-department incentive to establish GDPR-compliant privacy by design in an organization. The full list of GDPR compliance requirements includes keeping a Record of Processing Activities (ROPA) (Art. 30 GDPR), appointing a Data Protection Officer (DPO) (Art. 37 GDPR) and EU representative (Art. 27 GDPR), conducting Data Protection Impact Assessments (DPIAs) (Art. 35 GDPR), and introducing a data breach response plan (Art. 33 GDPR), among other provisions.

Yet, for website-centered online businesses, achieving GDPR compliance may not require the full scale of activities. For example, organizations with under 250 employees are, in limited cases, exempt from keeping documented records of processing. But only when the processing is occasional, unlikely to risk individuals' rights, and doesn't involve special categories of data (Art. 30(5) GDPR). In practice, this exemption rarely applies to an active website. Also, websites that don't run regular, systematic, large-scale monitoring of individuals generally aren't required to appoint a DPO. Unless they're a public authority or process special-category data at scale (Art. 37 GDPR).

Still, asking proactively for visitor consent, updating a privacy notice, and honoring visitor rights remain the key measures to make your website GDPR-compliant.

Who Is This Guide For

The step-by-step breakdown below applies to any website owner who needs to be GDPR-compliant based on their website data processing activities. Given the limited number of measures listed, it is a website-specific GDPR compliance checklist for SMBs and fast-moving teams who need to quickly fix their website and help it run smoothly in the EU market without triggering GDPR penalties.

How to Become GDPR-Compliant: 7 Steps for Website Owners

To be GDPR-compliant, your website needs a comprehensive audit for all the current data tracking and processing to design a privacy notice. After that, you should introduce an opt-in consent mechanism, respect data subject rights, and maintain data privacy protection in the long run.

1. Audit Your Website and Compliance Requirements

The starting point to comply with GDPR is to conduct an internal audit to see which personal data your website is processing, if you have the necessary controls in place, and which responsibilities to your website visitors you should reinforce.

What your internal compliance audit should include:

• Review seven principles explained in Art. 5 GDPR to establish privacy by design in your organization
• Identify each instance of personal data collection and processing to document them 
• Check out if you have a privacy policy and cookie consent banners on your website
• Determine whether you have any internal processes to control GDPR compliance

At this stage, your aim is to deepen your GDPR compliance understanding, determine what it means for your website, and set the priorities in adjusting your current processes and website appearance to the data privacy regulation requirements.

2. Scan Your Website for Tracking Cookies

One of the trickiest parts in GDPR compliance is managing third-party cookies and tracking pixels, as they are not always easy to identify on your website. Yet, you have to find all of them and ask for visitor consent before the personal data processing starts.

How to find third-party cookies on your website:

• For a manual review, use the Developer Tools. Access them on your website page in Incognito mode, choose the Applications menu, and click Cookies for the list.
• For a more actionable investigation, adopt an automated website scanner that can make it easier and faster for website owners with no coding knowledge.

Using a dedicated automation tool accelerates identifying tracking cookies, especially for large websites with many pages, several third-party tools, and complex setups that may have hidden workflows.

3. Map a Lawful Basis for Each Data Processing Activity

Art. 6 GDPR defines six lawful bases you can rely on while handling each case of private data processing:

• Consent: A GDPR cookie consent is the tool designed to give visitors control over access to their data.
• Contract: A dedicated contact with a visitors can be the basis for personal data processing.
• Legal obligation: Relevant when there is a law requiring private data collection or processing.
• Vital interests: The processing is part of protecting the life of an individual. 
• Public interest: Your website collects and processes data to perform a task of the public interest, including responding to emergencies, national security, and investigating the crime.
• Legitimate interests: The scope of commercial, individual, and broader societal interests that impact your organization (including network security and fraud prevention measures).

If you choose to rely on legitimate interests, you should confirm that each case of personal data processing passes a three-part test and is ready for external audit for GDPR compliance:

• Purpose test: What kind of interests are you pursuing? Are they part of IT security, direct marketing, or internal administrative purposes?
• Necessity test: Is the personal data processing required for the purpose identified? Is it targeted and proportionate for this need? 
• Balancing test: Do your interests for the selected purpose override the rights of individuals to control their personal data and protect themselves from harm?

Requesting consent is a transparent way to engage with your website visitors. It gives them control over how their personal data is shared and protected. That's why most websites use cookie consent banners to meet GDPR requirements.

4. Publish a GDPR-Compliant Privacy Notice

You should provide visitors with the full scope of information regarding your identity, purposes, and actions regarding the collected data so that visitor consent is freely given, specific, informed, and unambiguous (Art. 7 GDPR).

To make a GDPR-compliant privacy notice as required under Art. 13 GDPR, disclose this information in the website footer:

• The contact details of a data controller, or the actor who decides why and how the personal data is collected or processed
• The purposes of data processing, attached to its legal basis
• Recipients or categories of recipients of the personal data
• Third parties involved in the data collection and processing, along with the legitimate bases they rely on
• Grounds of fair and transparent data processing, meaning the storage period, respect for data subject rights, and disclosure of automated decision-making, including instances identified in Art. 22 GDPR

A GDPR-compliant website adds the link to the privacy notice at all the data collection points, including consent forms and cookie consent banners.

5. Add a Cookie Consent Banner

Websites can collect opt-in consent as a reliable basis for processing personal data via a GDPR-compliant cookie consent banner. 

How to implement your banner:

• Introduce it whenever a new visitor accesses your website
• Inform a visitor that your website uses cookies
• Explain which cookies and why you use to help visitors make an informed consent decision
• Provide them with choices (simply putting OK button is not GDPR-compliant)
• Whenever relevant, add a privacy policy or a cookie policy link

Getting granular controls over cookie preferences and providing ways to reject cookies is key for GDPR compliance, as these tools help protect visitor rights to change or withdraw consent and decline cookies. To adjust the behavior of your website accordingly, set up Google Tag Manager with Google Consent Mode.

6. Implement Mechanisms to Respect Data Subject Rights

Ch. III GDPR defines a list of data subject rights each website should respect to be compliant:

• Right to be informed: Art. 12 GDPR requires disclosing any information related to data processing in plain language and in a concise, transparent, intelligible and easily accessible form. Make sure the privacy notice and cookie consent banners on your website are easy to understand and don’t contain any jargon.
• Right to access: Art. 15 GDPR gives individuals the right to confirm whether you're processing their personal data and to receive a copy of it, along with details on how it's used.
• Right to rectification: You should make it easy for a visitor to modify the personal data they shared with you or with third parties through you to address Art. 16 GDPR requirements.
• Right to erasure: Following the GDPR's storage limitation principle helps websites uphold the right to be forgotten under Art. 17 GDPR.
• Right to restriction of processing: Art. 18 GDPR requires websites to provide tools for visitors to restrict processing their data, for example, by using your contact email address to send a Data Subject Request (DSR).
• Right to data portability: As stated in Art. 20 GDPR, your website should provide an individual with the right to obtain and directly transfer their personal information to another controller (whenever it’s technically possible).
• Right to object: If you operate on a legitimate interest or a public duty legal basis, you should have tools to immediately respect the decision of an individual to object to processing their personal data (Art. 21 GDPR). For consent-based data processing, you should add an option to withdraw consent on a cookie consent banner.
• Right not to be subject to a decision solely on automated processing: In case your website relies on automated processing (including profiling), you should respect an individual’s decision to safeguard data subject rights with at least human intervention in the process (Art. 22 GDPR).

Art. 12(3) GDPR sets a one-month deadline to respond to visitor requests (extendable by up to two months for complex requests), so put request forms and an internal response workflow in place to meet that window.

7. Maintain Ongoing GDPR Compliance

Treating GDPR compliance as a one-time activity increases the risks of non-compliance, as both your website and legal requirements constantly change. To address internal changes, schedule regular revisits of your privacy disclosures, control your process of responding to DSRs, and  properly test if your website responds accordingly to consent choices. 

Maintaining data security and relying on privacy by design, in accordance with GDPR principles, helps keep your website's data protection strong and helps you introduce new features and processes in a GDPR-compliant way.

Automate GDPR Compliance

Cookiebot by Usercentrics significantly facilitates the process for website owners wondering how to be GDPR-compliant. It helps to support GDPR compliance for websites on different levels: 

• Scans your website for tracking cookies and provides actionable insights
• Provides a customizable cookie consent banner with granular and GDPR-compliant choices to introduce on your website
• Has a pre-built template to wire up in Google Tag Manager to change the website behavior based on consent choices
• Securely logs consent documentation for external audits
• Uses geotargeting to adapt the website behavior based on the location of your visitors, so that visitors see the cookie consent banner that is compliant with the applicable data protection laws in their jurisdiction.

To help maintain ongoing GDPR compliance, our CMP scans your website monthly and detects new risks to keep your tracking information up to date and accurate.