There’s nothing quite like a good old-fashioned spring cleaning. Whether it’s deep-cleaning floors or removing unused items from closets, decluttering brings a sense of relief and order. The same philosophy can be applied to our digital spaces: over time, websites can become cluttered with unnecessary tags, slowing performance and complicating user experience.

What if we apply this same philosophy to our digital properties and websites? Website tag bloat, the digital equivalent of an overstuffed closet filled with clothing you haven’t worn in years, occurs when unnecessary tags or tracking scripts build up over time. This bloat significantly impacts site speed and user experience by increasing average load time by 6.77 seconds.

This is a big deal because research shows that load time directly affects bounce rates—almost exponentially with each second of delay. Google reports that increasing load time from 1 second to 3 seconds raises bounce rates by 32%. Managing the tags on your website must be a priority to optimize performance. It’s non-negotiable.

Thankfully, just like spring cleaning your house gives you that “fresh start” vibe, a digital spring cleaning will do the same for your website.

The Surprising Cost of Tag Accumulation

Tag bloat is a significant issue that not only affects end users but also poses compliance, data, and privacy risks. It’s a form of technical debt, usually stemming from inattention rather than incompetence. Tags accumulate slowly and steadily, often going unnoticed as marketing and web teams continue installing new software and marketing technology on the website.

The ongoing rapid growth of marketing technology is a major driver of tag bloat. ChiefMartec’s 2024 Marketing Technology Landscape features more than 14,000 products. Even more striking is the fact that the number of tools grew by 27.8% year-over-year in 2024. This surge in tools is directly mirrored in the increasing number of tags deployed on websites worldwide.

Add to this the staff turnover, where employees who originally deployed the tags have left, taking with them the institutional knowledge of why those tags were implemented in the first place.

Tag bloat isn’t only reflected in metrics like bounce rates or site speed reports from your SEO team; it also incurs hidden costs, such as data inaccuracies, costly compliance violations, and data vulnerabilities.

In a recent webinar with our friends at Merkle Cardinal Path, Nick Iyengar talks about an "in the wild" example of this blog. The tag bloat problem was having a huge impact on website experience, slowing load time to 17 seconds.

Digital Spring Cleaning To Declutter Your Website

If your closet is full of clothing you haven’t worn in years, sometimes the answer is to reorganize and sort it. More often than not, the real solution is to package up those clothes and donate them to a goodwill organization.

This is the same recommendation we have for your website: the best way to declutter the tags from your website is to remove them altogether. The solution is to move to a server-side tagging system.

Client-side tag management systems are a legacy system. More than a decade ago, they were an innovative technology that helped us add tags and capabilities to websites. This used to be a difficult task, often requiring a developer. Client-side technologies were a breath of fresh air at a time when seemingly simple tasks, like adding a conversion tracking pixel to your site, took weeks and developer involvement.

Server-side tag management technology is the modern approach to tag management. It allows you to remove tags altogether rather than trying to trim, prune, or otherwise reorganize tags. In client-side models, you have to add a tag for every vendor or conversion event you track leading to dozens of tags, many of which are redundant. Moreover, these tags then need to run in the client (aka, the user's browser) and send data to a 3rd party.

Server-side solutions reduce this multitude of tags to a single tag that captures event data and routes it to your server. Once the data is on your server, you can process, manage, and distribute it to endpoints—far from the user’s browser—ensuring top-notch site speed with the added bonus of improved data control. For organizations concerned with data and privacy regulations, server-side tagging also allows for better compliance.

The move to server-side tagging is the digital spring cleaning and decluttering project that will future-proof your analytics and marketing technology. But getting started is often the hardest part. Here's our 4-step process for decluttering your website.

1. Conducting a tag audit
2. Evaluate the importance of each tag
3. Removing unnecessary tags
4. Tracking and monitoring

Step 1: Conducting a tag audit

Your digital spring cleaning starts with a tag audit. 

What is a tag audit? A tag audit is the systematic process of documenting all website tags and scripts installed on your website to determine their purpose. Through the audit process, it should be clear what tags are actively used, which ones are no longer in use, and how tags are currently being implemented on your site. Tag auditing should be a regular part of your website analytics and data collection. 

Part of the challenge with tag bloat is that the democratization of the tagging process made it really easy for anyone to add new tags to your website. Over time, your tag management system gets bloated with tags of unknown origin but is maintained on your website because someone is worried that some functionality will break if it’s removed.

At this stage, you'll want to document each tag and provide a bit of information about each tag. This will help you in subsequent steps. Here's an example of a table that you could use to track this in a spreadsheet.

Step 2: Evaluate the importance of each tag

Just like you might hold up clothing in front of the mirror after rediscovering it in your closet during your spring cleaning, you need to evaluate each tag. You need to answer key questions about each tag:

• Does this tag serve a critical business function?
• Is the data collected by this tag still relevant and accurate?
• Can the tag be consolidated with others?

When it comes to a server-side environment, you have far more options for each tag. For example, you may discover that you have a number of advertising tags that are fired based on the same conversion event such as shopping cart interactions or form submissions. In server-side tagging, you can consolidate those tags by collecting a single event on your website and then distributing that data to various endpoints as needed. Not only that, you can evaluate what data is being shared and only send the relevant data to the advertising vendor. This is a win-win scenario where you can improve site performance while improving data privacy for your customers.

This is often an overlooked component of moving to server-side environments and completing a thorough tag audit. By loading tags or scripts to your site from a third-party, there is no guarantee that those scripts aren't collecting additional data. With server-side tagging, you control the data collected and distributed. Data compliance enforcement at the moment of collection is the best way to future-proof your company and adhere to global regulations like GDPR and CCPA.

Step 3: Removing unnecessary tags

There are two ways to approach removing unnecessary tags:

• Remove tags you don't need
• Remove tags through consolidation

If your tag management system hasn't been audited in some time, then you'll likely come across many tags that are no longer required but still loaded on your website. This can happen by switching marketing automation providers, changing your web analytics setup, or through deploying and replacing tools in your martech stack. 

The other scenario is where tags have a shared or redundant purpose.In client-side systems, event collection will often trigger tags to fire in order to send data to various endpoints or third-party vendors. A conversion event could kick off a dozen or more tags to fire. With server-side tagging, that single event can still be used to kick off events but you're able to remove all the tags that distribute data and consolidate to a single tag that handles data collection. The data distribution component is moved to the server saving browser resources.

A common fear in the decluttering process is that tag removal will accidentally disrupt a necessary function. This is why it's important to conduct a thorough audit beforehand to evaluate the tag's purpose and importance. You can also mitigate this risk by performing tests in a controlled environment, such as a staging site, to confirm that removing the tag won't negatively impact your site's functionality.

Step 4: Tracking and monitoring

Will your efforts decluttering tags on your website have results? Yes, absolutely. In fact, they should have both short- and long-term results.

In the short term, moving to server-side tagging and removing tags from your site should have a marked and noticeable impact on site performance. Your website and SEO team will be able to closely monitor benchmarks to see the impact. Here are the metrics you can expect to see improve:

In the long term, the site performance and SEO benefits will help to improve conversion rates and dramatically improve user experience. Seconds matter for user experience, particularly on ecommerce sites where just a few milliseconds can impact revenue. 

Why Tag Auditing Matters

The era of legacy client-side tagging models is rapidly coming to a close. It was a good time while it lasted—perhaps a bit like the Wild West of tag management, where lawlessness prevailed. The client-side approach where every vendor got its own tag installed on your website created a few issues:

• Slows down site performance by requiring a multitude of tags to fire at once
• Potentially introduces privacy and compliance issues regarding what data is collected by the installed scripts
• Makes it difficult to audit data privacy and compliance

The answer is to move server-side. This modern approach to data collection isn't just future-proofed, it's essential. Regulations like GDPR and CCPA have introduced stringent new protections for consumers, and ignoring these regulations can be costly. Beyond the legal risks, server-side tools allow you to collect data, safely distribute it through practices like data anonymization, and clean it up at the point of collection. This enables compliance while making the data usable for personalization and AI use cases.

Just like spring cleaning in your house, the fresh start provided by server-side tagging and tag removal is essential to future-proof your website. Ready to experience the server-side difference? We can help with your spring cleaning!