Launch HN: Zaraz (YC W20) – Use third-party tools without slowing your website

Launch HN: Zaraz (YC W20) – Use third-party tools without slowing your website
4 by yoavm | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Hi HN! We're Yair and Yo'av of Zaraz ( https://zaraz.com ). We make websites faster by loading their third-party stack in an optimized way. By “third-party” we mean utilities or additional products you add to your website (eg. analytics), not things you build your website with (eg. React). Before we started this we worked on opposite sides of this battle for third-party inclusion: Yair was working for the folks asking to implement just-one-more analytics tool, while Yo'av was a developer trying (and often failing) to push back. Avoiding bloat to begin with would be preferable, but anyone working for even a medium-sized company knows how hard that is - usually when a higher up agrees to try or add a new tool, resistance is futile. Hence the question becomes, can you do it without harming your performance? The average US top 5,000 website loads 22 different third-party tools - analytics, customer success, marketing and whatnot. We wrote a bot that scanned these websites and discovered that third-parties account for 40% of their “Time to Interactive”, and other metrics like TBT, FCP, FID and CLS were hurt in a similar way. From the user perspective, the page usually behaves exactly the same without these tools (...except 40% faster). These new metrics are becoming more popular for two reasons. Firstly, users actually feel them - unlike events such as "DOMContentLoad" & "Load" that can be triggered long before the user can actually do anything, these metrics provide a much better proxy to the real user experience. Secondly, with Google soon penalizing slow websites, they're becoming more and more important for SEO. We see the growing popularity of these metrics as a good thing. We want a faster web. Nowadays, the most common way to integrate a third-party into your website is either to just paste its `