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: Assess third-party services (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, etc) as early in the ideation or creation process as possible and use as few 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 should only be used if a more performant alternative that achieves the same goal cannot be used instead.
- Self-Hosting: Prioritize self-hosted content over embedded content from third-party services.
- Avoiding Dependency: Create your own clickable icons and widgets, 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 should 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 should 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
- AdGreen
- Building for sustainability with WordPress
- Cookies, Pixels, and Tags
- Digital Eco-Design: Plugins and widgets
- Effectively loading ads without impacting page speed
- Electricity Intensity of Internet Data Transmission
- Environmental impact assessment of online advertising
- Fast Load Times: Optimize your third-party resources
- Front-End Performance 2021: Defining The Environment
- [GR491] 5-3036 – Necessary Analytics
- [GR491] 6-3045 – Third-party Solutions
- GreenIT (French) 019 – Remplacer les boutons officiels de partage des réseaux sociaux
- GreenIT (French) 4030 – Limiter le recours aux carrousels
- How ad platforms like Facebook, Google, and others drive climate change
- How efficient code increases sustainability in the enterprise
- How large DOM sizes affect interactivity
- How tracking pixels work
- JavaScript performance
- Lighthouse: Lazy load third-party resources with facades
- Make Better Ads (PDF)
- MicroJS
- Measuring energy consumption of cross-platform frameworks for mobile applications (PDF)
- Reduce the weight of a web page: which elements have the greatest impact?
- Reducing The Web’s Carbon Footprint: Optimizing Social Media Embeds
- [RGESN] (French) 2.5 – Third-party Services
- [RGESN] (French) 4.5 – Service Activation
- [RGESN] (French) 4.7 – Information Content
- Scope 3 Emissions in Your Digital Supply Chain
- Simple Icons
- Speed up your WordPress by loading 3rd party scripts on interaction
- Sustainable Web Design
- The Cost of Javascript Frameworks
- The User Experience of Chatbots
- Tracking pixel security
- Use as few plugins as possible
- Web Video Text Tracks Format
- What could the sustainability initiative do for WordPress?
- What is a tracking pixel, and how does it work?
- You Might Not Need