Cut Down on Third-Party Scripts

WordPress site has every integrations and plug-ins we need—Facebook tracking, multiple analytics platforms (Google Analytics, Hotjar, and some other obscure tool no one even checked), YouTube video embeds, a third-party chatbot, and of course, those “must-have” social media share buttons, but we have loads of these plug-ins, it is going to slow things down.

By using GTmetrix’s Waterfall chart, I saw just how much time these scripts were adding. Some external services took up to 2 seconds to respond. Others were blocking page rendering, meaning the entire page was sitting there, waiting… waiting… and waiting some more.

The Fix: Be Ruthless with Your Third-Party Scripts
Once I saw the data, the solution became clear—it was time for a major cleanup.

Host Essential Scripts Locally
Some scripts, like Google Fonts, don’t actually need to be fetched from an external source every time. I downloaded the fonts my client was using, hosted them directly on their server, and boom—one less external request. Instead of waiting for Google’s servers to respond, the fonts loaded instantly. You can do the same with things like FontAwesome icons or even some JavaScript libraries.

Defer or Lazy Load Non-Essential Scripts
Not every script needs to load immediately. Take social sharing buttons, for example. If a user is just reading the page, why should we load Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn’s tracking scripts upfront? Instead, I set them to load only when the user scrolls near the share buttons. Same thing for YouTube videos—I replaced the embed with a static thumbnail, so the full player and tracking scripts only loaded if someone clicked play.

Eliminate the Dead Weight
The biggest speed win came from getting rid of scripts that weren’t actually needed. Turns out, my client wasn’t even using Hotjar anymore—yet it was still running in the background, slowing down every page. The chatbot? Almost no one used it, and the ones who did weren’t converting. We ditched it.

And the results? After cutting the excess and optimizing what remained, the homepage load time dropped from 6.2 seconds to 2.8 seconds. The difference was night and day—faster interactions, lower bounce rates, and a smoother experience across the board.