This was a Talking Web newsletter on 24 February 2026 - join the newsletter here.

Hi,

I hope you’re having a great week so far! I’m feeling refreshed after half term last week – yes, an actually refreshing half term rather than a draining one! Which was nice. It included seeing Cirque du Soleil at the Royal Albert Hall which was pretty special.

This week’s action will take a bit of thought, but it’s important.

This week, please make a list of all of the 3rd parties your website relies on.

If you really don’t know where to start, ask your developer as they’ll be able to get stuck in (but you’ll obviously need to pay them for their time).

You can use my audit template here – it’s a Google doc and you’ll be prompted to make a copy when you visit the link so then you’ll have your own version you can update (and no one else will see your details on it).

Why do you need to know what 3rd parties you use?

Well for the same reason it’s important to know who your household utilities are with and what TV subscriptions you have…

  1. If someone goes wrong, you need to know who can fix it
  2. You need to know what’s costing you money each month/year (there’s space on the audit spreadsheet to mark if actually you can do away with one of the services to save some 💰💰)
  3. If it’s vital to your site, you need to know your details are up to date, and that billing won’t ever be interrupted
  4. 3rd party services hooked directly into your site can slow it down – so it’s a good idea to check what you’re using incase you can do away with some and save some precious load time.

If you do find you have lots of services plugged into your site that you rely on, consider setting up asset integrity monitoring so that you get alerted if a service goes down and breaks your site, or starts slowing things down. (Drop me an email if you want more info about that.)

Speak soon,

Lisa

PS. My 10 part SEO series started last night on Instagram – make sure you’re following along so you don’t miss anything.