What are third-party components doing to your site?

Description

We increasingly rely on third-party scripts to deliver some of the business-critical features of our sites – analytics, adverts, multi-variant testing, comments, recommendations, retargeting, social sharing etc.

Often these scripts get added with the seemingly innocent “it’s just a snippet of JavaScript,” but they can have a dramatic impact on performance, from slowing the page down to completely breaking it when a third party has availability issues.

Despite this explosion in third-party components there’s little information on the value they deliver, how they interact with our sites, and what their impact on performance is.

In this session we’ll share the insights we’ve gained from analysing the impact third-party scripts are having on performance of the sites we monitor, the value they deliver, and how our clients manage them.

We’ll look at which third parties are the most popular, how they interact with our pages, and how consistent their performance is.

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of third-party performance, and pointers to how to make informed decisions when choosing third parties.