Limit the impact of Wisepops' cookies on your website

Lisa Fockens Updated by Lisa Fockens

By default, Wisepops maintains the size of each one of our cookies under 3 KB. This is a compromise we choose to provide the best experience with a limited impact on the requests' size. We keep your visitor's history long enough without adding too much weight to your requests.

Unfortunately for some cases, this is not enough. When other services that rely on first-party cookies are installed together with Wisepops, the cookies' total size might exceed the maximum headers length of your server. This will cause your visitors to see 413 errors.

Wisepops can be configured to reduce its footprint on your requests. There are 2 different solutions that you can use.

If you set custom properties, be sure to use temporary custom properties wherever possible.

Use local storage instead of cookies

This is the preferred method. With this option, Wisepops will rely on the browser's local storage instead of cookies. The data of your visitors are still attached to your own domain, but won't be added to the requests made to your servers anymore. When this option is activated, Wisepops will take care of migrating the cookies we previously created to the local storage.

However, the local storage option will not work on cross-subdomain. With this option enabled, what happens on www.example.com is invisible for app.example.com. Let's consider the condition: "Exclude visitors who already saw 1 popup during the session". If a visitor sees a popup on www.example.com, then go to app.example.com, Wisepops will think that the visitor just arrived in your website. If you need your different subdomains to be connected together, please consider the second solution below.

To activate the local storage, copy and paste the following code between your setup code and the closing </script> tag:

wisepops('options', {
  browserStorage: true
});

The script containing your Wisepops setup code and this option should look like this:

Reduce the Wisepops cookie max size limit

Another solution is to change the cookie max size limit. Wisepops uses this limit to trigger the cleanup of the oldest data about your visitor. When this size is reached, Wisepops will "forget" that your visitor saw some popups. Specifically, the ones he saw the longest ago.

This solution is less elegant compared to the first one but does preserve the ability to share the data about your visitors across subdomains.

To change the default cookie max size to 1 KB, copy and paste the following code between your setup code and the closing </script> tag:

wisepops('options', {
  cookieMaxSize: 1024
});

The script containing your Wisepops setup code and this option should look like this:

Don't hesitate to contact us if you have any questions.

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