Pretty Links uses a small number of cookies to track unique visitors, prevent duplicate counts, and support advanced features. Here’s what each cookie does and why it exists, so you can document them in your privacy policy with confidence.
prli_besucher
- Lifetime: 1 year;
- Purpose: Identifies a unique visitor across multiple sessions and multiple links.
When a visitor clicks any pretty link for the first time, Pretty Links assigns them a random ID and stores it in this cookie. Subsequent clicks — even days or weeks later, even on different links — are recognized as coming from the same visitor.
This is what powers the Einzigartige Besucher count on your dashboard and the Einzigartige Besucher toggle in Klickverlauf. Without it, every click would look like a brand-new person, and you’d have no way to tell repeat visitors from first-timers.
The cookie is opaque (a random string) and is only read by your own site — Pretty Links never sends it anywhere or shares it.
prli_click_*
- Lifetime: 30 days;
- Purpose: Records that this visitor has already clicked a specific link.
Each time a visitor clicks a pretty link, Pretty Links sets a small cookie naming that link’s ID. The cookie expires after 30 days.
What it powers:
- Unique-visitor reporting — When
prli_click_<id>is absent, the click is counted as a unique visit (the link’sEinzigartigecounter or thestatic-uniquesmeta increments). When present, it’s counted as a repeat visit. The 30-day window is the unique-visitor sliding window.
A separate cookie is set per link the visitor interacts with. They’re tiny (a few bytes each), but if a visitor clicks dozens of your links, they’ll accumulate dozens of these.
prli_dedup_*
- Lifetime: 10 seconds;
- Purpose: Prevents accidental double-counting on the same click.
Browsers sometimes fire a redirect twice in rapid succession — for example, when a user double-clicks a link, when an extension prefetches the URL, or when a network hiccup causes a retry.
Without protection, each of those would count as a separate click and inflate your numbers. The prli_dedup_<id> cookie blocks duplicate counts within a 10-second window.
After 10 seconds the cookie expires, so genuinely revisiting a link a minute later still counts as a new click.
What Pretty Links Does Not Cookie
Pretty Links does nicht set tracking cookies for advertising, profiling, cross-site tracking, or any third-party purpose. Everything above is first-party only and exists purely to make your own click reports accurate.
It also does not use browser fingerprinting, localStorage tracking, or session storage to work around cookie controls. If a visitor clears the cookies, the prli_besucher ID is lost and they appear as a new visitor on their next click — which is the behavior most users expect.
For Your Privacy Policy
A typical privacy policy entry for Pretty Links cookies might read:
We use Pretty Links to manage and track outbound links on this site. Pretty Links sets first-party cookies (
prli_besucher,prli_click_<id>,prli_dedup_<id>) lasting between 10 seconds and 1 year. These cookies count unique visitors and prevent duplicate click counts. They do not contain personal data and are not shared with third parties.
Adapt the wording to match the rest of your policy and your jurisdiction’s requirements.
Combining With Consent Banners
If your site uses a cookie consent banner (required in many regions for non-essential cookies), check whether your banner blocks Pretty Links cookies before consent. If it does, click counts from non-consenting visitors won’t be recorded — which is the legally correct behavior in those regions.
You can pair this with Einfacher Tracking-Modus und IP anonymization for an even lighter privacy footprint.