Signs it is time to revisit third-party scripts

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few signals that third-party scripts is due some attention.

Most development decisions are really maintenance decisions wearing a different hat. Doing this properly once is usually cheaper than doing it approximately three times.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Every tag you add is code you do not control
• Chat widgets and trackers are common performance offenders

The practical version

Audit the list twice a year and cut what nobody reads. Small and consistent beats large and occasional here. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

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
• Audit the list twice a year and cut what nobody reads — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Worth checking on your own setup before it becomes someone else's problem to fix.