AnonAge Age Verification

No. Everything in this release — both self-declaration modes, all three enforcement levels, all of the appearance and targeting options — is free, needs no account and makes no outbound requests of any kind. Nothing about your gate depends on us being reachable. An account and a paid plan are only needed for verified mode, which is not enabled in this release.

There is no free live tier, and we would rather say so plainly than have you find out at the point of switching it on. A one-time £2 set-up fee covers the identity check on your own account, then from £2 a month including 10,000 verifications; £5 a month up to 50,000; and £2.50 per additional 50,000 after that, so 200,000 a month is £12.50 and a million is £52.50. The same numbers are charged in USD and EUR rather than being converted. Test keys are free and never counted, so you can build and test the whole integration before paying anything. The visitor pays a small fee for their own identity check as well. Between the two, that is what funds the service — rather than us making money from data about your visitors.

With "Cover the page" or "Hide the restricted part", no, and there is nothing to configure. The page sent to every visitor is identical — the gate is applied in the browser, and in split mode the restricted content is fetched separately over a request that is never cached. Do not add the anonage_verified cookie to any "vary cache on this cookie" list; it would fragment your cache for no benefit. "Withhold the whole page" is the exception. That decision has to be made per visitor, so PHP has to run — and on a cache hit it does not. The plugin therefore marks every gated page as uncacheable, which WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache and LiteSpeed all honour automatically. If you have a CDN in front of your site, including Cloudflare, add your own rule to bypass the cache on those URLs.

That depends on which enforcement level you choose, and it is the main thing to think about. "Cover the page" changes nothing — the content is delivered in full and indexed as normal. "Hide the restricted part" is the balance most sites want: the page, its title, its description and everything you place above the marker stay indexable, while the restricted part is withheld. Put your descriptive, keyword-carrying copy above the gate and it does the SEO work for the page. "Withhold the whole page" does hide those URLs from search engines, because the crawler receives the gate and nothing else. Use it only on pages with nothing safe to show, and keep your landing and category pages ungated so the site stays findable. There is no way to withhold content from visitors and still have that content indexed. Serving search engines something visitors do not get is cloaking, and it is penalised. This plugin does not do it.

With "Cover the page", yes — developer tools will remove any overlay, on any site, from any plugin, and turning JavaScript off stops the overlay existing at all. That level is advisory by design and is labelled as such. With "Hide the restricted part" or "Withhold the whole page", no: the content is not in the page at all, so there is nothing in the browser to reveal. The server checks a signed cookie in PHP before releasing it. If you are relying on this for a legal obligation, pair verified mode with one of those two — a real age check behind an overlay anyone can dismiss enforces nothing.

One cookie, anonage_verified, holding the age threshold they cleared and when it expires. It is signed with your site's own key so it cannot be forged. No personal data, no analytics, no tracking.