What to ask your agency about third-party scripts

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on third-party scripts, these questions are worth asking early.

The question is rarely whether something can be built, but what it costs to keep running afterwards. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Every tag you add is code you do not control. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

Audit the list twice a year and cut what nobody reads. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

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
• Every tag you add is code you do not control — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.