Your website’s strength is limited by its weakest link. Despite a secure design, incorporating third-party plugins increases vulnerability. If a third party you use is compromised then this can compromise your site as well.
Third-party relationships may use their own third parties. If one of these parties faces a compromise, it can trigger a chain reaction, putting your website at risk.
Ultimately, not paying attention to the third parties in use on your website can lead to data breaches and other threats.
The most common issues with third parties relate to performance. Anything you put on your site needs to be loaded when a user goes onto the website.
If you use a third party on your website which is very large or very slow, then this is going to massively slow down your website. The user might find it slow or frustrating to use.
Third parties might work well normally but might face performance issues. There might be a change to their infrastructure or a recent update that causes them to load slowly. There is an almost endless list of reasons why a third party might start to underperform; monitoring your third parties allows you to take action if your performance starts being affected.
Even ‘fast’ third parties can cause performance issues with poor management. The more things you put on your site, the longer the user has to wait for the page to load. Adding lots of third parties to your website, even if they seem innocuous, can start to make it slow and frustrating to use. Adding hundreds of small third parties is just as bad as one large one.
Like anything on the internet, third parties can go down. Your website might be up and running as normal but a third party could not be working properly or at all. Depending on what it does, this can have varying levels of severity if the third party goes down for any period.
If a marketing analytics tool goes down then this makes it difficult for sales and marketing teams to operate effectively but is not necessarily an urgent matter.
However, the issue can get much more serious. If a third-party payment gateway goes down then this will result in lost sales as customers are unable to complete their transactions. If the gateway continues to stay offline then this could result in thousands of lost sales.
Because third parties are out of your control, it becomes increasingly important to keep track of your most critical third parties and ensure they are operating as expected. That way you are more able to act if there is an issue.
Once you are aware of downtime, you have the power to do something about it. This could involve contacting the provider, informing customers about the issue, or keeping a watchful eye if the issue is less critical.