Cookie Policy
1. What are Cookies
A cookie is a small piece of data or message that is sent from a website’s server to your web browser and is then stored on your hard drive. They are generally used to improve your user experience by, for example, remembering what is in your online shopping basket or keeping you logged in on a website as you navigate from one page to another. Cookies cannot read data off your hard drive or other cookie files, and do not damage your system.
2. How we use cookies
We use cookies to help us:
• Make our website work as you would expect
• Save you having to login every time you visit the site
• Remember your settings during and between visits
• Improve the speed/security of the site
• Continuously improve our website for you
• Make our marketing more efficient (ultimately helping us to offer the service we do at the price we do)
We do not use cookies to:
• Collect any personally identifiable information (without your express permission)
• Collect any sensitive information (without your express permission)
• Pass data to advertising networks
• Pass personally identifiable data to third parties
• Pay sales commissions
You can learn more about all the cookies we use below.
3. Granting us permission to use cookies
If the settings on your software that you are using to view this website (your browser) are adjusted to accept cookies we take this, and your continued use of our website, to mean that you are fine with this.
Should you wish to remove or not use cookies from our site you can learn how to do this below, however doing so will likely mean that our site will not work as you would expect.
4. What cookies we use
Website Function cookies
Our own cookies
We use cookies to make our website work including:
• Determining if you are logged in or not
• Remembering your search settings
• Remembering if you have accepted our terms and conditions
• Allowing you to add comments to our site
• Remembering your preferences such as colours, text size and layout
The cookies currently being used on our website are:
• WordPress session cookie: allows users to log in, identify a user account and stay logged in once logged into the member’s area.
• Google Analytics (_ga, _gid, _gat): used to track visitor traffic and usage
• catAccCookies: a cookie set by the UK cookie consent plugin to record that you accept the fact that the site uses cookies.
• Wordfence (wfwaf-authcookie): provides additional security to our website by blocking brute force login attempts and tracking live traffic and country of origin of visitors
• Theme-style: adds accessibility features to the website including, high contrast and larger text sizes.
Anonymous Visitor Statistics cookies
We use cookies to compile visitor statistics such as how many people have visited our website, what type of technology they are using (e.g. Mac or Windows which helps to identify when our site is not working as it should for particular technologies), how long they spend on the site, what page they look at etc. This helps us to continuously improve our website. These so called “analytics” programs also tell us if, on an anonymous basis, how people reached this site (e.g. from a search engine) and whether they have been here before. This helps us assess how easy it is to access our website, how frequently it is re-visited and helps us decide whether we need to make improvements to our website.
5. How to change your cookies
Turning cookies Off
You can usually switch off cookies by adjusting your browser settings to stop it from accepting cookies -learn how here. Doing so however will likely limit the functionality of our website and a large proportion of the world’s websites as cookies are a standard part of most modern websites.
It may be that your concerns around cookies relate to so called “spyware”. Rather than switching off cookies in your browser you may find that anti-spyware software achieves the same objective by automatically deleting cookies considered to be invasive.