You've set up Google Tag Manager (GTM) to streamline your marketing tags, analytics, and pixels, just to experience a frustrating side effect—a sudden drop in your PageSpeed Insights score and a glaring warning to "Reduce the impact of third-party code."
This is the GTM paradox: the tool designed to make your life easier is now slowing down your WordPress website and hurting the user experience.
Which, unfortunately, leaves you with a difficult choice:
Fortunately, there’s a third option that can give you the best of both worlds: NitroPack’s Optimize Google Tag Manager feature.
Read on to find out more.
To understand why GTM slows down your site, imagine your browser's main thread as a single-lane highway. This highway is responsible for doing all the important work of building your webpage for the visitor: rendering the layout, applying styles, and responding to user actions like clicks and scrolls.
Google Tag Manager acts as an entry ramp onto this highway, allowing you to easily inject various third-party scripts—like Google Analytics, Meta Pixel, or ad network tags.
The problem is that each of these scripts is like a slow, heavy truck. When they are all injected onto the single-lane highway at once, they create a massive traffic jam. The main thread gets completely blocked, and nothing else can get through until these scripts are fully loaded and processed.
This "main thread blocking" directly leads to:
Instead of forcing you to remove your scripts, NitroPack’s Optimize Google Tag Manager (GTM) feature acts as a smart traffic controller. It understands that you need both performance and tracking, and it achieves this with a simple, two-part mechanism:
This smart delay ensures your core tracking remains intact while dramatically improving the initial loading experience for your visitors.
The impact of this intelligent loading strategy is significant.
Loading Method | What Happens | Result |
Standard GTM Load | The browser loads the page, GTM, and all third-party scripts at once, blocking the main thread. | A slow initial load, high TBT/INP, and a frustrating wait for interactivity. |
Optimized GTM (NitroPack) | The browser loads the page and GTM. Third-party scripts only load after the user interacts. | A lightning-fast initial load, low TBT/INP, and an instantly responsive page. |
You shouldn’t choose between analytics and performance. We all agree that they are both crucial for running a successful business.
That said, NitroPack allows you to have it all:
Activating this feature is incredibly simple:
No, your core GTM triggers and data layer remain active, and tags for engaged users will fire correctly.
Yes, very different. This feature is surgical. It specifically targets scripts loaded via your GTM container, leaving other potentially critical JavaScript untouched. This precision ensures performance is improved without breaking site functionality.
Optimize Google Tag Manager is available on our Pro and Agency plans.
Niko has 5+ years of experience turning those “it’s too technical for me” topics into “I can’t believe I get it” content pieces. He specializes in dissecting nuanced topics like Core Web Vitals, web performance metrics, and site speed optimization techniques. When he’s taking a breather from researching his next content piece, you’ll find him deep into the latest performance news.