Every website runs code it did not write. Analytics, chat widgets, payment buttons, social embeds, font loaders — each one is a third-party script running inside your pages, with the same access to your site as your own code. If one of those suppliers is compromised, the script your visitors load is compromised too, and it can read form inputs, change what a page shows, or quietly send data somewhere else.
This is not a rare edge case. The classic version is a payment-page skimmer: a script that was fine for months gets swapped for a malicious copy on the supplier's server, and every checkout on every site loading it starts leaking card details. The site owner changed nothing — the risk arrived through a script they trusted and stopped checking.
So treat third-party scripts like any other dependency: keep the list short. Remove the widgets, trackers and embeds you no longer use — most sites carry several they forgot about. For the ones you keep, load them from a source you trust, and where your site supports it, use Subresource Integrity (SRI) so the browser refuses a script whose content has changed. If a script only needs to run on one page, do not load it on every page.
And keep watching what your site actually loads. A free scan at https://vulnerabilitytools.com/ shows you what your site is exposed to — then check the scripts it flags, remove the ones you do not need, and lock down the ones you keep.
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