How we use cookies

Private Plates uses essential cookies for security, accounts, enquiries, purchases and other features you request. These cookies are necessary and cannot be switched off through our website.

If you allow analytics, we record what you do on this website. All of it: every registration mark you search for, every category you open, every private plate you look at, save or share, the vehicle you check your results against, the pages you move between, how long you spend on them, how you arrived (the name of the search engine, AI assistant or website that sent you, and any campaign tag in the link), and anything that goes wrong. We do this to improve the service we offer you, and we would rather say so up front than bury it.

We record this whether or not you have an account. Without one there is no name attached to any of it: a registration mark you search for is a string of letters, and we have nothing to connect it to you. With an account, it is kept against that account, so we can see what you have been looking for and serve you better when you come back.

We do not use cookies to show third-party advertising, track you across other websites or build advertising profiles. We do not sell your information.

You can turn analytics off at any time through cookie settings below. Turning them off will not prevent you from using Private Plates.

Cookie settings

Cookies that always run

These are needed for the site to work at all, so they do not need your permission and cannot be switched off here.

• Signing in. Two cookies keep you signed in, for the visit or for 30 days if you ask us to remember you. Your basket, shortlist and comparison are kept in this browser’s storage until you clear them.
• Live chat. A cookie lets you return to a conversation for 7 days.
• Your preferences. The colour theme, whether you are viewing number plates in white or yellow, which language you have chosen, and the results page you were last on, so Back to search returns to it.
• Your vehicle. If you enter your vehicle’s registration mark, it is kept on this device so your results stay limited to what fits it, until you press Reset or choose to change car. A cookie carries it to our pages for up to a year.
• Security. Protects sign-in and the checkout against misuse.
• This choice. What you decided about analytics, so you are not asked on every page.

Analytics, if you allow them

Nothing that measures how the site is used runs until you have said yes, and turning it off stops it again and clears the identifiers it made.

• A visitor identifier. A random number, made when you say yes. It is not worked out from anything about you or your device, and it is deleted when you say no.
• A visit identifier. The same, for one visit, gone when you close the tab.
• Which header pictures you have seen. A short list, so the home page shows you one you have not seen yet. Kept for a year, and deleted when you say no.
• Microsoft Clarity. Two cookies, one kept for a year and one for a day, so the pages of one visit are recorded together. Deleted when you say no.

We also use Microsoft Clarity to see how pages are used: where you tap, click and scroll, as a recording of the visit or as a heatmap. Anything you type is hidden before it leaves your device, and nothing at all is recorded on the checkout, your details, your account, your orders or the pages where you send us documents. Microsoft keeps a recording for 30 days, or up to 13 months if we mark it to keep.

What we record against them is set out above. We keep it for five years and then delete it.

Some things are never recorded, whatever you have allowed: passwords, card details, the words of any message you send us, and your email address or telephone number. We do not record what you type other than a search and a vehicle registration, and we do not fingerprint your device.

The registration of your own vehicle is not recorded. When you use it to limit results we record the make, the model and the year, because that tells us what our customers drive, and leave the registration itself on your device.

Anyone else

Card payments are handled by our payment provider, which sets its own cookies on its own fields for fraud prevention. Those fields are theirs, not ours, and no card number reaches us. Microsoft provides Clarity and holds its recordings for us. Cloudflare protects this site and checks that forms are sent by a person; it may set a short-lived security cookie. Our privacy notice says what we hold and why.

Last updated 19 Oct. 2026.

Our privacy notice explains what we do with the details you give us, the terms and conditions set out what you buy under, accessibility says how the site is built to be used by everyone, and contact us is where to ask.