Third Party Content is any content linked from your webpage which you don't have direct control over. For example, an advertising beacon or externally hosted JavaScript library. First Party Content, on the other hand, refers to content you either host yourself or have the ability to update and change. JavaScript hosted on your servers, images on a separate image server, etc. In general, you can optimize your First Party content but not your Third Party (other than choosing who you wish to partner with).
The ability to sort, track and classify First vs. Third Party Content is important for Rigor Optimization users. Our platform allows users to classify which content they have direct control over making it easy to focus their attention to content on their site that they have direct control over.
Sorting First and Third Party Content
To begin, let’s dive straight into an example. Go ahead and select New Test from the top level navigation, and then Create New Test. Enter your site URL and you’ll immediately see a new expanding section similar to this:
This is a new real-time URL tester that not only tests the validity of the URL you provide but also sniffs out the domains of all linked resources off the base HTML page. Pick the domains you know are yours (First Party Content) and leave out those that are known Third Party. This will seed the new performance test with the list of domains it should treat as First Party.
Go ahead and click Start Test and wait for the snapshot to complete. When done, if a large percentage of Third Party Content was identified (say you missed a domain in your initial selection), you’ll see a warning like this:
This warning typically only displays if you didn’t select a large First Party Domain in your initial selection above. It could also occur, though, if a large percentage of Third Party Content is loaded by JavaScript execution or linked from secondary resources like your CSS files.
If the warning is in error, just dismiss it and you’ll never see it again for that Performance Test. If it’s accurate, though, then follow the link to update your First Party list and you’ll see a view similar to this:
This is a list of all Third Party domains detected during the performance snapshot. To see more detail, just click any of the host name links and you’ll see all the linked content, filtered by domain, for that snapshot. For example:
Once you’ve confirmed which domains were erroneously tagged as Third Party, return to the Third Party Hosts view (click the Third Party tab, Hosts sub-tab), select the First Party hosts and then click the Set as First Party toolbar button.
This action will reclassify all linked resources for the selected hosts as first party content, recalculating all totals and rollups to reflect this change. In addition, your selections will be applied to all future performance snapshots as well, so you’ll only have to do this once.
Notice how the Third Party percentage dropped from 98% to 80%, while the roll-up amounts on all the other tabs increased. Click on any tab to see the updated results from your selection.
Now you may have noticed the original warning message above mentioned that this action can be undone later. To (re)classify content as Third Party, simply visit the Hosts subtab of the Content tab, and check off those domains that should be Third Party using a similar process to above. This will update the snapshot once again, and also (re)apply to future tests.
In addition, if you visit a specific detail page for an analyzed item, you’ll see options to set as First Party or Third Party at the top of the specific detail page, for example:
Allow and Block lists
Okay, we’re almost done here, but there’s one last important topic to cover. You may have noticed earlier I mentioned all changes reflect the current and all future snapshots. This is important to recognize as it means you should only rarely have to administrate your Third Party content list. Once you establish your baseline settings, they’ll just auto-apply for each new test and snapshot.
If you wish to fine tune these settings, you can manage these on a new tab under Settings called Third Party Content.
This page manages your First Party allow list (domains to always classify as First Party) as well as Third Party block list (domains to always classify as Third Party). These settings are automatically updated whenever you apply changes using the process in the previous section, but if you wish to fine tune your results further you can do so directly on this page.
Trending First and Third Party Content Over Time
Okay, we’re almost done here, but there’s one last important topic to cover: the ability to trend first and third party content over time using Snapshot History Graphs. Organizations often want to track how the content on their site changes over time. This is especially helpful to enforce performance budgets. It also helps detect when a large amount of content is added, even if that content is well optimized. Let’s use another example to see how Snapshot History Graphs can help surface problems with content.
First, click the SnapShot History button seen below:
Once upon the Snapshot History page, you can see the Total Content Size for a page, trended over time, for both First Party Content and Third Party Content. This is great to be able to see what types of content increase and decrease over time and what caused it. For example, take a look at the Snapshot below and you'll see a huge spike in First Party Content around March 2nd:
To get more data as to why, switch over to the Content By Type view and filter to only show First Party Content:
Wow! Looks like 1300KB of images were added to the site from March 1st to March 2nd. This is extremely valuable data to be able to improve your site performance over time.