Third-Party Scripts | The Elephant on Your website
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Third-Party Scripts | The Elephant on Your website
Third-Party Scripts are the external code fragments that can be embedded into a site directly from a third-party vendor. These scripts are designed to augment the existing functionality on the site, especially where it is better to buy or rent the functionality rather than build on your own. Mostly, Third-Party Scripts are used for social sharing buttons, advert, analytics, tracking, personalized content, product reviews, live chat, etc.
Before we dive further into how these almost obscure entities impact the user experience and thus the bottom-line, let us quickly review how we got here…Before we dive further on how these almost obscure entities impact the user experience and thus the bottom-line, let us quickly review how we got here…
The late Nineties to early Noughties
Network and caching were the mantra for performance. CDNs gained popularity by caching static assets, let’s call them images as back then, JS and CSS were more or less non-existent.
Fewer network hops and improving cache hits strategies worked well in this era because the network latencies used to be high — most people were still on dial-up internet and broadband was starting to emerge in the mainstream.
Rest of the Noughties
The second wave of web commercialization, web 2.0, was a push to make it look pretty with heavy images and powerful styles. Alongside, Javascript was gaining momentum towards driving interactive functional aspects on the browser itself, threatening server-side’s control. Need for Speed got people focussing on image optimizations as that was the bulkiest thing on the page.
Twen-teens
By now, JavaScript had proved it is here to stay and rule the browser world for the foreseeable future. This led to an explosion of JavaScript-based frameworks that in turn enabled thicker web front-ends.
Personalization became the mantra for success and with JavaScript becoming powerful and standardized across browsers, the division of control between front-end and server-side functionality is now blurring.
Performance optimizations now focused on how to optimize the JavaScript code files.
The later part of the decade saw H2 gaining support and the techniques to optimize JavaScript code in the new H2 world changed a bit. Though many sites are still using the methods from the earlier part of the decade, which are counterproductive.
Nevertheless, the prevalence of JavaScript support led many innovations to happen and allowed companies to provide browser-based integrations of their services directly in the browser.
2020 and beyond…
Digital Commerce and Content landscape is changing. Third-Party Scripts have proliferated all sorts of use cases from analytics to personalization to live-chat to product reviews and the list goes on. So much so that before, if 90% of the programming was 1st party now, it's almost becoming the opposite.
It is an age of services. The world is adopting Microservices. Such loose coupling across multiple systems gets consolidated on the front-end using Third-Party Scripts. In some architectures, the original platform has decoupled its internal functional elements as if they are Third-Parties. A single page can have more than 100 third-party requests and it would not be an outlier.
They have a downside too in the sense they leak information on the page to the third-party vendors while opening up vulnerabilities for Cross-Site-Scripting attacks. Poor User-Experience undoubtedly reduces the bottom-line of any digital property. Third-Party Scripts add functional value to the site; however, they need to be managed effectively to yield gains.
Third-Party Scripts are the primary cause of poor page speed.
SPEED
Often, issues on a website slowing pages down are due to third-party scripts. Embedding Third-Party Scripts means we often rely on them to be fast. The situation becomes even further bleak when most sites do not have effective measurement metrics that monitor the impact of Third-Party Scripts on their users’ experience. Performance issues are not noticed by the site owners yet bite users.
Sites that have such measurement tools in place, mostly brush the issue under the carpet as something beyond their control. The technical team washes their hands that this is not their code and hence beyond the control. Poor Speed undoubtedly reduces the bottom-line of any digital property, hence Third-Party Scripts should be given careful attention such that they do not negatively impact the speed.
SECURITY
Third-Party Scripts are the intentional inclusion of JavaScript code that is downloaded and communicate with extremal servers. XSS (Cross-Site Scripting) vulnerability is where attackers are attempting to inject external JavaScript code into your website pages. A keen eye would realize that these two are not much different.
Any time external scripts are included on a page, there is an inherent security risk because that script has full access to the content, cookies, and user interactions on that page. It may be sharing a lot more data with the third parties than expected.
Challenge in a traditional digital security approach is that it tries to build security fences and governance processes around vectors that are originating from within the system. Security professional mostly fails to realize that Third-Party Scripts, which are not originating from any internal system and not pushing data to any internal systems can be a cause of data leaks.
How Nitrogen helps…?
The Nitrogen Platform provides easy to implement cloud-based software-as-a-service that enhance user experience and protects the bottom line. Our JS Manager module understands an ever-growing catalog of Third-Party Scripts. This catalog is categorized based on the use case. The platform also is capable of circuit breaking and providing delayed async execution to enhance user experience.
In conjunction with the Nitrogen accelerated delivery platform, the third-party scripts can be served from the super-fast content delivery network.
