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You’ve spent months putting together a great website design, crowd-pleasing content, and a business plan to bring it all together. You’ve focused on making the web design responsive to ensure that the widest audience of visitors can access your content. You’ve agonized over design patterns and usability. You’ve tested and retested the site for errors. Your operations team is ready to go. In short, you’ve done your due diligence in the areas of site design and delivery that you directly control. You’ve thought of everything… or have you?
Your website may be using more third-party services than you realize. These services use requests to external hosts (not servers you control) to deliver JavaScript framework libraries, custom fonts, advertising content, marketing analytics trackers, and more.
You may have a lean, agile, responsive site design only to find it gradually loaded down with more and more “extras” that are often put onto the site by marketing departments or business leaders who are not always thinking about website performance. You cannot always anticipate what you cannot control.