You are in a race to get your content in front of your target audience as quickly as possible. You are competing in this race with all the millions of other web pages on the Internet, and your users WILL go somewhere else if the load times are unreasonable. Cloudflare Zaraz can give you the boost you need.
This is a modern tag management service for modern times. It can process all the third-party integrations in the form of tags through its serverless cloud architecture (called Cloudflare Workers) instead of on the user’s browser.
It’s not simply an alternative to Google tag manager.
It’s one step above.
These third-party tools include things that all online businesses should employ if they wish to make it far, such as Facebook Pixel and its alternatives, as well as indispensable automation tools.
Cloudflare Zaraz can host these and many more for you without making a dent in the website’s performance!
Let’s take a closer look at how this innovative technology came to be and how it can improve page speed & SEO ranking and help you scale your business!
The Problem with Tags & Third-Party Bloat
Tags are essentially scripts – bits of JavaScript code that get placed on web pages and collect information. They are how third-party tools like the Facebook Pixel and Google Analytics collect information from your website.
Years ago, you had to go and manually install the snippet of JavaScript code on every single page.
This required the skills of a developer. It wasn’t a task that people from other departments could handle.
In some cases, it was a complex operation since they would have to change a tag across multiple pages, which was very time-consuming. This was a process that was prone to human error. When a person went and changed a bit of code, it was possible that they could mess something else up and break the site.
Google tag manager succeeded in centralizing tag activity. We can consider the manager as a bucket that gets installed once on a website, and we can remotely add or edit things in that bucket. We can also set special conditions and firing rules, allowing for greater control.
Tag managers took away the need to involve developers in this process. In doing so, they gave more power to business owners while freeing up manpower and time.
However, after years of dominance in the field, people are starting to search for alternatives to Google Tag Manager.
Nowadays, there are so many tags that need to be installed that the tag manager code that loads the bucket has to check a whole list of conditions and fire a bunch of scripts, which essentially creates a large amount of JavaScript files that need to load into the user’s browser to execute and then run. This causes the page to slow down.
The name of the game is speed. Google seems to agree with us. Speed is a huge factor (sometimes the deciding factor) in the equation that determines your ranking on SERPs (Search Engine Results Page).
Cloudflare Zaraz is by far the best choice among all the Google tag manager alternatives out there.
The Cloudflare Zaraz Solution
Cloudflare has been making big moves for a while now, putting out great features to improve productivity and quality of life. Their acquisition of Zaraz is looking to keep the ball rolling.
If you’re relying on third-party solutions for your website, Zaraz can significantly boost your website’s speed by not running the tag code in the browser.
It moves a lot of the heavy lifting (code processing & condition checking) to the server-side. It uses on-demand servers all over the globe to execute the code close to the user and thus very quickly. It then returns the right amount of stripped-down code that is necessary to run on the page.
This results in a substantial reduction in weight that has to load on the page on the client-side.
This way, it gets pre-processed much faster on servers and then delivered to the browser.
Google tag manager requires prior technical knowledge to make the most of it. Zaraz is more streamlined and simplified so that anyone can use it, from the marketing to the sales department.
See What Cloudflare Zaraz Could Do For You
You can go straight to the Zaraz website and analyze your website’s current performance. Just enter your URL, wait a couple of minutes, and you will be given two scores: one for your speed right now and one that you could achieve by implementing Cloudflare Zaraz.
This isn’t some vague promise of “Make things faster,” either. They give you a detailed plan of attack and go point by point over the different aspects that they can improve upon. These include Web Core Vitals like Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and First Input Delay (FID). Google has stated that it uses these metrics in its SERP ranking algorithm.
This breakdown clearly shows that it can drastically shave down these times, thus giving you a better performance in your SEO efforts.
Final Words On Cloudflare Zaraz
We use Google Lighthouse to test web page optimization on desktop and mobile for ourselves and our clients. We can optimize all the components and underlying code of a page to get a great speed score. But even when we get to 95-99%, Google tag manager is the one thing keeping us from reaching a perfect score since we do not have control over its scripts.
This is why we believe Cloudflare Zaraz is a step in the right direction for your business!
The Zaraz team offers the beta version for free on their website, so don’t wait, try it out now and see for yourself how much you stand to gain from embracing this new technology!
If you need any help setting up Zaraz or any other digital tool, don’t hesitate to contact us right here. We will schedule a call right away to talk about all the ways we can leverage technology to scale your business. Let’s discuss your vision and develop an actionable plan to make it a reality.
We can’t wait to hear all about your company and get to work on improving your business, so we hope to hear from you soon!
