Your website should be handled with care, and that is why we heavily invest in how our tags are operated and make sure they play nicely with every environment. The Exatom tags are carefully constructed and measured to ensure that it has negligible impact on the performance of any page on which it is 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

Page load and rendering

We use the following techniques to ensure your page is rendered quickly and without any compromises. Above all, we will not tolerate any delays.

Asynchronous loading of the Exatom tags We have configured all our tags to load asynchronously to optimise website performance. When visitors request our tags that are 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 utilising a Content Delivery Network (CDN), we significantly enhance the performance and reliability of our services. The CDN acts as a distributed server network that caches and hosts our tag content, ensuring it is easily accessible to visitors worldwide. When a browser requests our tags, the CDN automatically selects the server closest to their location and delivers the cached content from that server. As a result, visitors experience fast response times and minimal latency, regardless of their geographical location.

Tag caching It's crucial to ensure that the Exatom scripts load and execute quickly, even if they are loaded asynchronously. To achieve this, we additionally use the in-browser cache (one hour). This means that consecutive loads of our tags will be cached and do not require the browsers to re-download the tags from the Exatom CDN. After the in-browser cache expires, our tags are once loaded again from the CDN and cached again to ensure fast loading.

Tag size Our main tag event.js is only ~30kb gzipped. By keeping the size of our scripts small, we minimise the time it takes for the browser to download and process it, resulting in faster loading times and improved 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.