How we use cookies on our website

What is a cookie?

When we talk about cookies on a website, we're not talking about the yummy chocolate chip kind - although we always have a stash of these in our office! Cookies are small text files which are downloaded and stored on your device when you visit a website. They don't pose any threat to your device, they're simply there to make sure you have the best possible experience while you browse the website.

Cookies can be used to help show you your preferred version of a website - for example, a certain font size or language which you've selected in the past - to make it quicker and easier for you to use the website. Other cookies can help track anonymous data about how users interact with a website, giving a website owner information on how they can improve the website and browsing experience. Advertising cookies can help show ads and personalised product recommendation to those who may be interested in it.

What cookies do we use and why?

At Welford, our team have spent lots of time designing and building our website in order to make it easy to use for our clients. Through this, we've used certain cookies in order to make it the best we can.

Strictly necessary cookies

• CRAFT_CSRF_TOKEN -Website protection against Cross-Site Request Forgery attacks
• CraftSessionId - This cookie name is associated with the Craft web content management system, where is functions as an anonymous session identifier.
• _cfduid - Cookie associated with sites using CloudFlare, used to speed up page load times. According to CloudFlare it is used to override any security restrictions based on the IP address the visitor is coming from. It does not contain any user identification information.

Performance cookies

• _ga - This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics - which is a significant update to Google's more commonly used analytics service. This cookie is used to distinguish unique users by assigning a randomly generated number as a client identifier. It is included in each page request in a site and used to calculate visitor, session and campaign data for the sites analytics reports. By default it is set to expire after 2 years, although this is customisable by website owners.
• _gid - This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics. This appears to be a new cookie and as of Spring 2017 no information is available from Google. It appears to store and update a unique value for each page visited.
• _gat - This cookie name is associated with Google Universal Analytics, according to documentation it is used to throttle the request rate - limiting the collection of data on high traffic sites. It expires after 10 minutes.
• optimizelyBuckets - Cookie set by the Optimizely website optimisation platform. Used to store the page variants assigned to a user for A/B performance testing, to ensure the user gets a consistent experience
• __utma - This is one of the four main cookies set by the Google Analytics service which enables website owners to track visitor behaviour and measure site performance. This cookie lasts for 2 years by default and distinguishes between users and sessions. It it used to calculate new and returning visitor statistics. The cookie is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
• __utmz - This is one of the four main cookies set by the Google Analytics service which enables website owners to track visitor behaviour measure of site performance. This cookie identifies the source of traffic to the site - so Google Analytics can tell site owners where visitors came from when arriving on the site. The cookie has a life span of 6 months and is updated every time data is sent to Google Analytics.
• optimizelySegments - This cookie is set by the Optimizely website optimisation platform. It holds audience segmentation information for a visitor.
• optimizelyEndUserId - Cookie set by the Optimizely website optimisation platform. This cookie is a unique user identifier
• _mkto_trk - This cookie is associated with an email marketing service provided by Marketo. This tracking cookie allows a website to link visitor behaviour to the recipient of an email marketing campaign, to measure campaign effectiveness.
• _vwo_uuid_v2 - This cookie name is associated with the product Visual Website Optimiser, by USA based Wingify. The tool helps site owners measure the performance of different versions of web pages. This cookie ensures a visitor always sees the same version of a page and is used to track behaviour to measure the performance of different page versions.
• wm_landing - Records the first page the user visits on the website at the start of a new session. Used for site performance purposes.
• wm_referrer - Records the referring website which the user came from. Used for performance purposes.

Advertising cookies

• __ar_v4 - This cookie is associated with the DoubleClick advertising service from Google. Helps with tracking conversion rates for ads.

How to remove cookies

Most internet browsers will accept cookies automatically by default in order to give you the best browsing experience - however, if you'd like to remove any cookies you can usually do this through your browser settings. You can view any cookies on your browser and then delete or restrict certain cookies if you wish. Most browsers will give you the option to block all cookies however we wouldn't recommend this as you might not be able to access parts of our (or other) website.

To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit http://www.aboutcookies.org.uk/.