Our mission to create user-friendly research tools requires us to care deeply about all aspects of user experience, including the technical implementation. If you're integrating Iterate on your website you'll find answers to common questions below. If you have a question not covered, you can always email us at [email protected]
What's required to add Iterate to my website?
Installing Iterate on your website is as simple as pasting the embed script for your account onto your site. This only needs to be done once and will work for all surveys you run.
Does Iterate slow down my page load?
No. In order to not impact page loading time, our embed script does nothing until the 'load' event has fired on the browser. This only happens once that page is at the end of the document loading process. This means that all of the objects in the document are in the DOM, and all the images, scripts, links, and sub-frames have finished loading. Only then does Iterate add its loading script to the page and make a request to our API to see if a survey should be displayed.
Does Iterate impact my SEO?
No. Search engines primarily look for "time to first byte" (TTFB) and the Critical Rendering Path. Iterate doesn't load until after both of these events have occurred.
Do I need to put the script on all of my pages?
No. You may want to put it on all pages so you can run surveys on any page at any time, however, the minimum requirement is to have the script on the page you wish to run a survey on.
Does this work with single page apps (SPA)?
Yes. Iterate monitors for changes to the URL and treats those as if the user had navigated to a new page in a non-single-page-app.
Does Iterate add anything to the global scope?
The only variables that are added to the global scope are 'Iterate' and 'iterateSettings'. All other dependencies we use are internally scoped and do not interfere with the global scope in any way.
Does Iterate use 3rd party cookies?
No. Iterate uses 1st party cookies to identify users for the purpose of knowing if they've previously filled out a survey, dismissed a survey, etc. Since it's a 1st party cookie it can't be used on any other domain or for any other tracking purpose.
Does Iterate use a CDN?
Yes. We distribute our embed scripts using Cloudflare's global CDN.
Does Iterate cache its scripts?
Yes. Your visitors will only need to download the Iterate SDK once, then it will be cached.
We use two scripts to load Iterate. The first is called the 'loader' which is a tiny (1k) file used to fetch the fastest version of the Iterate SDK. That loader is cached for a few hours so it can point to changes to the SDK quickly. The SDK is the primary script which contains all of the logic to display the surveys. This script is cached for a year, ensuring your users only need to download it once.