Will Exatom slow down my website?

Will Exatom slow down my website?

Your website should be handled with care, which is why we invest heavily in how our tags are operated and ensure they work well in every environment. The Exatom tags are carefully designed and tested to have minimal impact on the performance of any page where they are embedded. In this article, we cover common questions about Exatom and site performance:  

  • Page load and rendering

  • Page interactivity

  • Examples of Exatom embedded on websites

Exatom is ISO 27001 certified, demonstrating that we operate a robust Information Security Management System (ISMS) aligned with international standards for processing, protecting, and storing your data. Our certification covers documented policies and procedures for high availability, backups, disaster recovery, access control, and regular security audits. Choosing Exatom means your data is managed with rigour and in accordance with globally recognised security best practices.

Page load and rendering

We employ these techniques to ensure your page loads swiftly and without any compromises. Most importantly, we will not accept any delays. 

Asynchronous loading of the Exatom tags We have configured all our tags to load asynchronously to enhance website performance. When visitors request our tags embedded on your website, the browser doesn't pause or wait for the Exatom tags to load before loading the rest of the website's content. Instead, the browser is instructed to continue loading the website's content while the tags load in the background. 

Fast-loading tags worldwide By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), we greatly improve the performance and dependability of our services. The CDN functions as a distributed network of servers that caches and hosts our tag content, making it easily accessible to visitors worldwide. When a browser requests our tags, the CDN automatically chooses the server closest to their location and delivers the cached content from that server. As a result, visitors experience quick response times and minimal latency, regardless of their geographical location.

Tag caching It is essential to ensure that the Exatom scripts load and execute swiftly, even when loaded asynchronously. To accomplish this, we also rely on the in-browser cache (lasting one hour). This guarantees that subsequent loads of our tags are cached and do not necessitate the browsers re-downloading the tags from the Exatom CDN. Once the in-browser cache expires, our tags are loaded again from the CDN and cached again to maintain quick loading times.

Tag size Our main tag, event.js, is only about 30KB gzipped. By keeping our scripts small, we reduce the time browsers need to download and process them, leading to faster load times and a better user experience.

Page interactivity

When everything is loaded, it's vital that visitors can start as-soon-as-possible with their journey on your website. The only thing left for Exatom is to begin identifying forms and user interactions on those.

To ensure that we do not delay any visitor interactions on your website, we use the following techniques:

Passive and non-blocking event listeners Our default and go-to implementation of event listeners are passive and non-blocking. This is for maintaining webpage responsiveness while interacting with the webpage. Non-blocking means we do not prioritise ourselves above other existing or future event-handling operations on your website.

Non-blocking and non-prioritised transfer of anonymous event data to Exatom We rely on the browser to determine the optimal time for sending information to Exatom instead of dictating specific instructions in a way that prioritises (high-priority) certain events. This is once more an effort to refrain from interfering with your website and playing nice with all other technologies you employ.

Examples of Exatom embedded on websites, e-commerce platforms

Exatom provides its form analytics services to many organisations across different industries, including e-commerce, automotive, hospitality, pharmaceutical, financial institutions, etc.

To illustrate how Exatom compares to existing technologies that you employ and what impact it has on your website, we listed a few of our clients. We used the Chrome build-in performance DevTools to measure and visualise our impact.


Future work

Our team is devoted to consistently assessing the functioning of our tags and scripts and exploring new or improved standard (build-in) web browser APIs to optimise Exatom's features. This ensures that your website performs optimally regardless of whether you enable form analytics or not.


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