A cookie banner that didn’t block anything

I built this site from scratch. Over the next couple of years, marketing tools piled up on top of it, and eventually the client came back with one ask: make it faster.

Part of the answer showed up in the first audit. HubSpot, GSAP and Finsweet Attributes all loaded up front, and together they added about 4.4 seconds of blocking time before the page could respond to anything.

HubSpot and Finsweet now wait for the visitor’s first interaction, so they cost nothing on load. GSAP had to stay, because the page animates as it loads, but its cost dropped from 1.8 seconds to 0.3.

The other part wasn’t in the audit. The site had a cookie banner, and visitors could decline tracking. It made no difference. Around eight marketing and analytics services loaded on every page, immediately, before anyone had clicked anything.

That’s a speed problem and a compliance problem at the same time. “Decline” has to actually mean decline.

The fix lived in Google Tag Manager, and that’s where it got difficult. The container had been edited by different people over two or three years, and tags fired on triggers nobody remembered setting up. Before changing how anything loaded, I had to work out what each tag did and when it fired.

Then the rebuild. Nothing was removed — every service still runs. But marketing and analytics tags now wait for an actual yes, and nothing loads before the first render unless the page needs it.

Two days of work. The page loads without waiting on tools the visitor hasn’t agreed to, and the banner does what it says.