Every developer knows dependency hell. You ignore updates for six months, then one day everything breaks because Package A requires Package B version 3, but Package C still needs version 2, and now your build fails at 4pm on a Friday.
Marketing stacks have the same problem. Nobody talks about it.
Your GTM container has tags from campaigns that ended two years ago, still firing on every page load. Your WordPress site runs plugins that haven’t been updated since 2022. Your tracking scripts reference APIs that were deprecated last year. None of it is broken—yet. But it’s rotting.
We know because we audit these stacks constantly. And what we find is almost always the same: technical debt that nobody’s tracking, because marketing teams don’t think of their tools as “code.”
They should.
What Marketing Dependency Hell Looks Like
GTM Containers
Most GTM containers we audit are graveyards. Tags added for campaigns that ended years ago, still firing. Triggers that don’t match the current site structure. Custom HTML tags with inline scripts from vendors who’ve pivoted twice since implementation.
The problem compounds over time. Marketing tags stick around long after campaigns end, leading to containers with dozens—sometimes hundreds—of forgotten tags. Each one adds potential conflicts, debugging complexity, and page load overhead.
GTM containers have a 200KB size cap. We’ve seen containers approach that limit purely from accumulated cruft.
WordPress Plugins
The data here is stark: over 52% of WordPress vulnerabilities come from outdated plugins. Not sophisticated zero-day exploits—just plugins that have patches available but not applied.
It gets worse. According to Patchstack’s 2024 security report, 97% of all new WordPress vulnerabilities in 2023 were in plugins, versus just 0.2% in WordPress core. The plugin ecosystem is where the risk lives.
In real-world breaches, the pattern is consistent. Sucuri’s security analysis found that just three outdated plugins—RevSlider, GravityForms, and the TimThumb image script—were responsible for about 25% of all WordPress hacks observed in one quarter. Each had updates available long before the breaches. Nobody applied them.
If your site has plugins that haven’t been updated in months, you’re not “stable.” You’re exposed.
Third-Party Scripts
The average web page today includes 35+ third-party scripts running in the background. Tracking pixels, analytics, A/B testing tools, chat widgets, review platforms, consent managers—they accumulate.
The performance impact is measurable. Industry data from HTTP Archive shows websites typically serve about 450KB of their own code but approximately 850KB of third-party script code—nearly twice as much external code as internal.
A single badly-behaved third-party script can completely block your page from rendering. Across popular sites, the 10 most common third-party services add around 1.4 seconds of blocking time during page load on average.
This directly affects marketing outcomes. One analysis found that common A/B testing tools add anywhere from 100ms to 1,500ms of load time and degrade Core Web Vitals scores by 10–30%. The script meant to optimize conversions may be silently killing them by making your page slower.
Why This Doesn’t Get Fixed
The honest answer: it’s not billable, it’s not visible, and it’s not urgent—until it is.
Not Billable: Clients don’t ask for “audit my GTM container for dead tags.” They ask for “run more ads” or “fix the conversion tracking.” Proactive maintenance doesn’t fit neatly into a statement of work.
Not Visible: Unlike a broken website, a rotting marketing stack degrades silently. Page speed slows by 200ms. Conversion data gets slightly less accurate. Security vulnerabilities exist but aren’t exploited. Nobody notices until the audit—or the breach.
Not Urgent: The WordPress plugin that hasn’t been updated in two years still works. Why touch it?
Because when it finally breaks, it breaks catastrophically. Nearly 14% of hacked websites had at least one vulnerable component at the time of attack—often a plugin with a known patch that simply wasn’t applied.
How We Think About This Differently
We treat marketing infrastructure like code. That means:
Version Control for GTM
Google’s own documentation encourages exporting GTM containers as JSON files for version control: “If your workflow makes use of text-based tools such as diff and Git for change management, use container export and import for this purpose.”
We do exactly this. Container configurations get exported and committed to Git alongside website code. Every change to tracking setup—adding a tag, modifying a trigger—is tracked, reviewable, and reversible.
This eliminates the “someone changed something in GTM and we don’t know what” problem. When debugging why a conversion stopped firing, you can diff the current container against last month’s version and see exactly what changed.
Scheduled Audits
GTM containers need the same maintenance discipline as code. Best practice is a light review monthly and a deeper cleanup quarterly—not when something breaks, but on a schedule.
What we check:
- Orphaned tags: Anything from campaigns that ended, still firing
- Duplicate tags/variables: Redundant items that slow page loads and confuse debugging
- Heavy custom code: Custom HTML tags that should be refactored or moved to the codebase
- Naming conventions: Standardized prefixes (e.g., “GA4 –” or “Meta Pixel –”) so anyone can understand the container
- Performance impact: Tags firing on every page that don’t need to, or loading large libraries unnecessarily
As one industry guide put it: “GTM clean-up isn’t a one-time task; it’s a recurring best practice. Schedule it, document it, and treat your container like the mission-critical asset it is.”
Automated Plugin Updates
Manually logging into 20+ client websites to update plugins weekly doesn’t scale. We use WordPress management platforms—tools like ManageWP or MainWP—to centrally monitor and update all client sites from a single dashboard.
These tools show which plugins have updates available, flag security issues, and let us push updates across all sites with proper backups in place. Instead of waiting until a plugin breaks or becomes a security hole, we run scheduled updates weekly.
The result: every client’s plugins get patched promptly when new versions release, dramatically reducing the window of exposure to known vulnerabilities. It’s automation applied to marketing infrastructure—the same approach DevOps teams use for production systems.
The Uncomfortable Questions
If you work with a marketing agency, ask them:
- When was the last time you audited our GTM container?
- Do you have a process for updating WordPress plugins, or do you wait until something breaks?
- Can you show me documentation of what tracking scripts are running on our site?
- What happens to the tags and pixels you add when a campaign ends?
- Is our GTM container configuration backed up anywhere outside of GTM itself?
Most agencies won’t have good answers. That’s not because they’re bad agencies—it’s because the industry doesn’t treat marketing infrastructure as infrastructure.
We do.
What You Can Do Today
Audit your GTM container. Export it (Admin → Export Container), open the JSON file, and search for tags you don’t recognize. If you find tags referencing campaigns from 2021, they shouldn’t still be firing.
Check your WordPress plugins. Log into your site, go to Plugins, and look at when each was last updated. Anything that hasn’t been updated in 12+ months is either abandoned or you’ve missed updates. Both are problems.
Inventory your third-party scripts. Open your site in Chrome DevTools, go to the Network tab, reload, and filter by “JS.” Count how many external domains are loading scripts. If the number surprises you, you have cleanup to do.
Run a Core Web Vitals test. Use Google’s PageSpeed Insights on your key pages. If your scores are orange or red, third-party scripts are often the culprit.
The Bottom Line
Dependency hell isn’t just for developers. It’s for anyone running a modern marketing stack—which is everyone.
The difference between a technical agency and a traditional agency isn’t just that we can write code. It’s that we think about your marketing infrastructure the way engineers think about production systems: something that requires monitoring, maintenance, and proactive care.
Your GTM container is code. Your WordPress site is infrastructure. Your tracking scripts are dependencies.
Treat them accordingly.
Not sure what’s running on your site? We offer marketing infrastructure audits that document what you have, identify what’s broken or rotting, and prioritize what to fix. Request an audit.
Related: Conversational Search Is Here — Is Your Schema Ready? — Technical SEO foundations matter as much as your tracking stack.
Sources: