Agevow – Age Verification & Age Gate

No. A date of birth is used to work out whether the customer is old enough and is then dropped: it is never saved on the order, in the record, in a log or in any other place on your site. The order keeps how the age was asked, the minimum age, the result and the time.

No. The age gate works on any WordPress site; the question at checkout joins when WooCommerce is active.

Open Agevow in the admin menu. Say what your shop sells (a minimum age is suggested, with the fact behind it), where the gate shows and how visitors answer, look at the preview on a desktop or a phone, and press Turn on.

Yes. Choose "Only age-restricted products" under where the gate shows, and mark the products or product categories that need it. The rest of the shop stays open, and the checkout asks only when the cart holds a marked product (or every cart, if you choose).

Yes. In the block editor, add the "Age-restricted section" block and put the content inside it; in a post or a page without blocks, write [agevow_section] before the content and [/agevow_section] after it, or [agevow_section age="21"] for its own minimum age (without it, the site's minimum age is asked). Only that part waits for the visitor's age, the rest of the page stays open, and it works whether the age gate for whole pages is on or off. Search engines read the section's words like any other part of the page; feeds and excerpts never show the question.

Only if you want. Under Settings, choose for how many months (up to 24) a logged-in customer who passed the check is remembered on their account: their next orders in that time are not asked again, and each such order's note says which check it relied on. Guests are asked at every order, a product with a higher minimum age asks again, and setting the months back to 0 (as installed) forgets every customer remembered so far.

Open the product and choose its minimum age under "Age-restricted" on the General tab. Quick edit and bulk edit in the Products list set it for many products at once, and a product category's own screen sets it for every product in that category and in the categories under it. A product asks the higher of its own age and its category's. The Products list shows each product's age in its own column.

When the cart holds an age-restricted product (or every cart, if you choose), the WooCommerce checkout asks the customer to confirm they are old enough, or to enter their date of birth — the classic checkout and the checkout block alike, and the page where an order is paid later. The order is refused on your server until the question is answered, and refused if the date is under the minimum age, whichever way the order is sent. The date of birth is used to work out the age and is never saved: the order keeps a note of the check, its method, its minimum age and its time. A line on a restricted product's page can tell customers what the checkout will ask.

Yes. The checkout block shows the same question as the classic checkout, and WooCommerce's own checkout route refuses the order on your server when the answer is missing, under the minimum age or a date that does not exist. The check is made while the order is still a draft, before any payment is taken.

They are left in place. An order sent by an express payment button goes through the same check on your server as any other, so when the cart needs the question and it has not been answered, the order is refused with a message that says what is missing.

The Checks screen lists every checkout check: the order, the date, how it was asked, the minimum age and the result, refusals included. Beside it are the age gate's daily counts, as reported by visitors' browsers, and the history of your settings: who changed what, and when. Choose the days, download the checks as a CSV file, or print a dated summary (or save it as a PDF). Nothing in it identifies a visitor.

The Checks screen and its printable summary: for the days you choose, which orders were asked their age, how, at which minimum age, with what result, and which settings were in force on each date. It shows what was asked and answered; it is not advice about any law, and it does not prove who a customer is.

Agevow sends every visitor and every search engine the same page. The page's content is in that page, and the age question is drawn over it in the visitor's browser; Agevow never redirects to a separate age page and never checks who is visiting. Google's guide "Avoid intrusive interstitials and dialogs" (Google Search Central, last updated 10 December 2025) leaves out interstitials a site has to show, such as an age gate, and asks that the content be overlaid rather than redirected. How a search engine ranks a page is its own decision.

Yes. A page carries the same age question for every visitor, and each visitor's answer is kept in their own browser, so a cache can keep one copy of the page for everyone. It is tested with WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, WP Fastest Cache and Cache Enabler, and behind a cache in front of the site that keeps one copy of every page for every visitor, the way a CDN's "cache everything" rule does. When you change where the gate shows, its age or its look, Agevow clears those plugins' caches. A cache in front of your site, such as a CDN, keeps the copies it already holds until they expire: purge it after you turn the gate on.

One, in the visitor's own browser: agevow_ok, holding the minimum age passed and the day, for the number of days you choose (30 unless you change it). It holds no birth date and nothing that identifies the visitor. If the browser refuses cookies, the gate asks again on each page.

Yes. The age question fits a phone, a tablet and a desktop screen. The date of birth opens the phone's number keyboard, the field stays above the keyboard and the page does not zoom in on it, and the question keeps clear of the notch and the home bar. It is tested in Safari on an iPhone and an iPad, in Chrome on Android, in private windows, with cookies blocked, and in the browsers inside social apps, where the gate simply asks again after the app is reopened. On an iPhone the answer is remembered for the days you choose, not only the week Safari allows a page's own cookie.

The age question is a dialog that a screen reader announces by its heading. The keyboard stays inside it until it is answered, Escape does not close it, each mistake in a date is said in words next to its field, and the fade is left out for visitors who ask their device for less motion. The page underneath does not move when the question appears or goes away.

The page shows, with a line at the top saying the minimum age it is for. At the classic WooCommerce checkout the question is still asked, and the order is still refused until it is answered.

If the gate's script has not started within 4 seconds (blocked by an extension, or lost on a failing network), the page opens. A broken script never locks a visitor out.

For each order checked at checkout it keeps how the age was asked, the minimum age, the result and the time — never the date of birth. If you choose to remember customers who passed, a customer's account keeps the minimum age, the method and the time of their check. The settings history keeps which user account changed a setting. It adds suggested text to the privacy policy guide (Settings › Privacy) that says what it keeps, what it does not and what its cookie holds. Tools › Export Personal Data includes a customer's age checks, a check remembered on their account and a user's own settings changes. Tools › Erase Personal Data forgets a remembered check, takes the age checks off a customer's orders whenever WooCommerce removes the personal data of those orders, and keeps them with the order when WooCommerce keeps it; a user's name is taken off the settings history, which then says "a former user". The daily counts hold nothing about anyone.

Deactivating keeps everything. Deleting the plugin from the Plugins screen removes everything it stored, on every site of a network: the checks, the daily counts, the settings history, its settings and the marks on products, categories, orders and customers' accounts. The notes on your orders stay. To keep a copy, download the CSV and save the printable summary from the Checks screen first.

WordPress 6.9 and later, PHP 7.4 to 8.4, and WooCommerce 8.0 and later. Each version of Agevow is tested with the current WooCommerce and the versions before it, with WooCommerce's order tables switched on and off, with block and classic themes, page caches, a persistent object cache, a multisite network, a right-to-left language and translations.

Agevow checks ages and keeps a record. Whether a shop meets a law is decided by that law and its regulator. This is not legal advice.

No. Ofcom, the UK's online safety regulator, has said that asking visitors to state their own age is not the kind of age check the Online Safety Act asks of the services it covers, which have had to use such checks since 17 January 2025 or 25 July 2025, depending on the service (read on 13 October 2026). Agevow asks visitors to state their age: it is made for shops and sites that want an honest age gate and a question at checkout. This is not legal advice.

No. The PACT Act, extended to vapes in December 2020, asks a seller to check a buyer's name, date of birth and address against a commercially available database before a delivery sale (read on 13 October 2026). Agevow does not make that check: it asks the customer's age at checkout and keeps a record that it was asked. This is not legal advice.

Not yet. Everything described here is free and stays free, with no limits: the age gate, the question at checkout, the record, its downloads and the privacy tools. We are considering an optional paid service for orders that need more than the customer's own word, where a specialist checking company would check the age on its own page; the "Get early access" link at the foot of the Gate screen lets you ask to be told if it is built. It is never shown as a notice, and nothing in this plugin is locked behind it.