Seven third-party script patterns we triage before touching CSS

We still hear the same opener in client calls: "Could this be our CSS?" Sometimes yes. Often no. On plenty of sites, the first real bottleneck is not your h1 style or a spacing token. It is third-party JavaScript that arrives early, executes long, and competes with the content users came for. Before we touch CSS on a slow page, we run one quick triage pass. It is not fancy. For a key template, this is a short set of script patterns we can usually spot in under an hour, then turn into action item