Web Development Insights

At DrupalCon Atlanta 2025, I had the privilege of presenting “Tag! You’re It. Digital ‘freeze’ tag with GTM” - a session exploring how to master Google Tag Manager while balancing the competing demands of privacy compliance and website performance.

The Modern Tag Management Challenge

For marketers and developers alike, Google Tag Manager (GTM) has become an indispensable tool. It simplifies the deployment and management of various tags across your website - analytics tags, marketing pixels, tracking scripts, and more - all without requiring coding skills for each change.

Your website looks great. It tells your story, showcases your work, and presents your services beautifully. There’s just one problem: it’s not generating leads at the rate your business needs to grow.

Many businesses treat their website as a digital brochure—a place to park information that might be helpful if someone already knows about you. But in reality, your website should be your hardest-working salesperson: qualifying leads 24/7, nurturing prospects automatically, and feeding your sales team a steady stream of qualified opportunities.

When your business is growing and your website is struggling to keep up, you face a critical decision: redesign what you have or rebuild from the ground up? This choice can mean the difference between a smart investment that accelerates growth and an expensive mistake that holds you back.

For growth-stage businesses, this decision becomes even more crucial. You need a platform that can scale with your ambitions, support evolving marketing strategies, and integrate with your expanding tech stack—all without draining resources or disrupting operations.

At the 2024 Pacific Northwest Drupal Summit, MindSing sponsored a session exploring the critical relationship between Core Web Vitals, Google Tag Manager, and site performance. The session, “Speedy Delivery, Win the GTM, SERP, and CWV Game with Layout Builder and Tailwind,” demonstrated how to maintain perfect performance scores while meeting the demands of modern marketing teams.

The Performance Paradox

You’ve optimized your Drupal site. Your code is clean, your images are compressed, your CSS is minimal. You run a Lighthouse audit and… 85. Not bad, but not the perfect 100 you were aiming for. What’s holding you back? Often, it’s not your code—it’s Google Tag Manager.

When evaluating a content management system, the initial license fee is just the beginning of the story. The real question decision-makers should ask isn’t “What does it cost to buy?” but rather “What will it cost us to own, operate, and scale this platform over five years?”

The answer might surprise you. Despite aggressive marketing from proprietary vendors positioning themselves as “enterprise-ready” or “all-in-one solutions,” the total cost of ownership (TCO) and long-term return on investment (ROI) consistently favor open source platforms—particularly Drupal and WordPress.