Third-Party Scripts Are Guests Who Never Leave

Every third-party script is a small, ongoing bet: it runs on every page load, it can block rendering if it's not loaded carefully, and it's code the team doesn't control and usually doesn't audit after the day it was added. A page can accumulate half a dozen of these over a few years without anyone deciding that in one sitting.

Loading strategy matters more here than almost anywhere else in a static site's performance story — a script deferred until after the page is interactive costs a fraction of the same script blocking the initial render, and the framework-level tooling for this exists specifically because the default (a plain script tag) gets this wrong by default.

The habit that actually keeps this under control is periodic removal, not just careful loading — treating each third-party script as something with an expiration date to reconsider, not a permanent fixture nobody's allowed to touch.