A practical checklist for third-party scripts

It is rarely the thing that gets a project approved, and often the thing that decides how it goes. Run through this the next time third-party scripts comes up.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

The checklist

• Every tag you add is code you do not control
• Chat widgets and trackers are common performance offenders
• Audit the list twice a year and cut what nobody reads
• Someone is named as the owner
• There is a date to review it again

The reason this keeps coming up

Every tag you add is code you do not control. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

How to tell if yours is fine

Code gets read far more often than it gets written, and usually by someone with less context than the author had. Three things worth confirming about third-party scripts before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Chat widgets and trackers are common performance offenders — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.