3.7 Rigorously Assess Third-Party Services

Whether advertising, chatbots, maps, or other tooling; outsourcing your service to a third-party provider may be potentially useful in certain scenarios in reducing design or development time and redundancy (which can be a win for sustainability). Third-party services, however, come with issues, such as the lack of control over emissions, and they often can potentially suffer from latency and large file sizes which may not exist if you self-hosted or created the material.

Criteria

Assess Third-Parties: Third-party services (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, etc) have been assessed as early in the ideation or creation process as possible and as few of them are used as possible to reduce the product or service’s overall ecological impact, including Scope 3 emissions.
Third-party Implementation: Third-party content (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, etc) should be placed behind a click-to-load delay screen (using the “import on interaction” pattern), while alternatives to automated solutions such as chatbots should be offered.
Libraries And Frameworks: Large CSS libraries and JavaScript frameworks are only be used if a more performant alternative that achieves the same goal cannot be used instead.
Self-Hosting: Self-hosted content has been prioritized over embedded content from third-party services.
Avoiding Dependency: Your own clickable icons and widgets have been created, rather than relying on third-party services to host or allow embedding within your product or service.
Third-party Preferences: Third-party products, services, libraries, and frameworks are often a source of sustainability issues that cannot be controlled or managed by the first-party provider of a service. While many do provide benefits to a website, the need to justify their inclusion must be made not only by those creating the product or service but also be able to be controlled by the consumer. As showcased with cookies, websites or applications can provide a similar mechanism of disabling or refusing non-first-party features (with explanations of their purpose) – unless such features can be proven as critical for functionality.

Impact

High

Effort

Medium

Benefits

Environmental:
Replacing heavy tooling and third-party services with lightweight tooling reduces visitor bandwidth usage considerably, despite having to learn a new way of doing things or reducing the visibility of such information. It can significantly reduce a page’s (and data you have no control over) environmental impact, especially when it comes to Scope 3 emissions.
Privacy:
Visitors not interested in embedded content may identify the lack of third-party tracking (such as embedded pixels and tags) as a privacy benefit, as there are fewer chances that visitor data is exploited.
Performance:
Self-made widgets and controls work much faster than third-party content as you don’t have to perform additional server requests, rendering requests, and such. You only include what features you require, and this reduces the overall size of the bandwidth usage (and emissions produced).

GRI

materials: High
energy: High
water: High
emissions: High

Example

Code:

<iframe src="https://example.com" loading="lazy" width="600" height="400"></iframe>

It’s time to lazy-load offscreen iframes.

Resources

View the Guideline