
Dealing with Third Parties with Karolina Szczur
02/06/20 • 53 min
You can do all the work to make your own code as fast as possible, but a few ill-performing third-party scripts can still bring your site to a crawl. In this episode, Karolina Szczur talks all about third-parties: how big of an issue they really how, how to identify which ones are the most problematic, and what you can do about it.
So it's not necessarily a binary choice—in some cases, sure. But there are strategies that you can use to mitigate that performance that you just have to be aware of them and you have to start with having that conversation. The responsibility is actually on us, not necessarily on the vendor that's providing the service.
A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-four-with-karolina-szczur/
Links:
- Karolina Szczur on Twitter
- Karolina Szczur's site
- Patrick Hulce on Twitter
- Calibre
- The State of the Web
- Addy Osmani on Twitter
- Third Party Web
- Lighthouse
- Firefox Focus
- How We Improved the Performance of Our Live Chat by 30%
- Netlify
- Heroku
- Google found a 400ms delay resulted in less engagement
- Reducing the Intercom Messenger Bundle Size by 65%
- Harry Roberts' tweet showing a performance waterfall with and without third-parties
- Ben Schwarz on Twitter
- Performance Email Newsletter
- Calibre on Twitter
You can do all the work to make your own code as fast as possible, but a few ill-performing third-party scripts can still bring your site to a crawl. In this episode, Karolina Szczur talks all about third-parties: how big of an issue they really how, how to identify which ones are the most problematic, and what you can do about it.
So it's not necessarily a binary choice—in some cases, sure. But there are strategies that you can use to mitigate that performance that you just have to be aware of them and you have to start with having that conversation. The responsibility is actually on us, not necessarily on the vendor that's providing the service.
A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-four-with-karolina-szczur/
Links:
- Karolina Szczur on Twitter
- Karolina Szczur's site
- Patrick Hulce on Twitter
- Calibre
- The State of the Web
- Addy Osmani on Twitter
- Third Party Web
- Lighthouse
- Firefox Focus
- How We Improved the Performance of Our Live Chat by 30%
- Netlify
- Heroku
- Google found a 400ms delay resulted in less engagement
- Reducing the Intercom Messenger Bundle Size by 65%
- Harry Roberts' tweet showing a performance waterfall with and without third-parties
- Ben Schwarz on Twitter
- Performance Email Newsletter
- Calibre on Twitter
Previous Episode

Performance for the Long-Haul with Katie Hempenius
A lot of work falls under the umbrella of "web performance" and it's hard to know where to focus, both for quick wins and for long-term maintainability. In this episode, Katie Hempenius talks about everything from JavaScript and image weight, to third-party challenges, budgets and the importance of organizational support.
Now maybe your first party site is actually pretty decent and is holding the line but you keep getting push back from marketing to just keep adding more third party content and that is just really slowing the site down and that's one of those things...that issue is bigger than engineering. You need to have the company kind of come to an agreement on what your strategy is going to be around third party.
A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-three-with-katie-hempenius/
Links:
- Katie Hempenius on Twitter
- Improving Page Performance in Modern Web Apps with Katie Hempenius
- Addy Osmani on Twitter
- Speed at Scale: Web Performance Tips and Tricks from the Trenches
- HTTP Archive
- Tweet about page size increase
- Lighthouse
- WebPageTest
- PageSpeed Insights
- Bundlesize
- LightWallet
- 77% of sites use at least one vulnerable JavaScript library
Next Episode

Reaching the Entire UK with Matt Hobbs
Performance is always important, but that's especially true for anyone providing essential services over a wide range of connections and devices. In this episode, Matt Hobbs talks about the challenges of building sites that perform well for the entirety of the UK.
Everything that we do in terms of accessibility, in terms of web performance, in terms of content design, we have to be catering to the largest number of people possible because one thing that we can't, we can't just say, well we're not going to support X or you're not going to support Y. Because in doing so we may just be excluding a certain demographic of the UK.
A full transcript is available at: https://chasingwaterfalls.io/episodes/episode-five-with-matt-hobbs/
Links
- Matt Hobbs on Twitter
- Matt Hobbs' site
- SpeedCurve Page Speed Benchmarks
- Tammy's post on SpeedCurve's Benchmarks
- Government Digital Service
- GOV.UK Design System
- Polyfill.io
- Chrome User Experience Report
- Lighthouse
- WebPageTest
- SiteSpeed.io
- From Hackathon to Foundational Performance with Reefath Rajali
- GDS Blog
- Technology in Government blog
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