A lot of optimization articles focus on how you can speed up your WordPress site, such as optimizing your images or moving to a faster host. While all of these are important, today we want to discuss with you the impact of third-party performance and how it affects your WordPress site. Basically, anything you call externally from your site has load time consequences. What makes this problem even worse is that some of them are only intermittently slow, making identifying the problem even more difficult. Today we’re going to explore ways to identify and analyze third-party services and performance issues.
- What Are Third-Party External Services?
- Identifying External Services
- Analyze Ongoing Third-Party Performance Issues
- Analyze Intermittent Third-Party Performance Issues
What Are Third-Party External Services?
A third-party external service could be considered something that communicates with your WordPress site from outside of your indonesia email list own server. Here are some common examples we encounter on a regular basis:
- Social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Instagram (widgets or pixel conversion)
- Third-party advertising networks such as Google Adsense , Media.net, BuySellAds, Amazon Associates
- Website analytics like Google Analytics, Crazy Egg, Hotjar
- A/B testing tools like Optimizely, VWO, Unbounce
- Comment systems in WordPress like Disqus, Jetpack, Facebook comments
- Backup and security tools like VaultPress, Sucuri, CodeGuard
- Social sharing tools like SumoMe, HelloBar
- CDN networks such as KeyCDN, Amazon Cloudfront, CDN77 and StackPath
- Externally hosted Javascript
How External Services Cause Problems
External services usually have Analyzing Third-Party Performance two problems. One is caused by high volume, the other has to do with waiting for pages to load.
- If you have a lot of external services , you will have to load all of them and wait for information about them on each page load. The more calls you have, the longer you wait, the higher the load on your own server and the higher the chance you will run into the second problem.
- In some cases, the page will take a while to load until the data transfer between your site and the external service has been completed. If the service is called in the header and there is a service interruption, your page will simply refuse to load.
Of course, there are things you can do to speed up processes, such as loading scripts asynchronously, but we’ll cover that later. In most cases, sheer volume is one of the biggest problems you’ll have to deal with when debugging third-party performance issues.
Identifying External Services
Identifying these services isn’t too difficult. One of the easiest ways is to open up a website speed testing tool , be it Pingdom, GTmetrix, WebPageTest, or Chrome Devtools and run your website through it. You should see a list of resources that were loaded. Hover over a resource and if it doesn’t contain your domain name at the beginning, that audience profile examples will be an external service or external asset that you’re calling.
If you don’t know what the third-party Analyzing Third-Party Performance service is for, you can always try to navigate to the main domain or search for their name on Google, as the developer or associated company will come up. This is a good way to determine if the service is legit. As you can see below, searching for the jQuery file turns up a few well-known companies like jQuery and Google that describe hosting this file. So they are probably safe.
Analyze Ongoing Third-Party Performance Issues
If your website is always slow, you’ll need cell phone number to figure out what’s slowing it down. If your website has intermittent issues, that’s a little more difficult. Let’s start with ongoing slowness. We’re assuming here that your website is slow due to external services. While many speed issues can be caused by external services, there are a whole host of other issues, so this may not solve your problems.