In the fast-paced world of web development, we often focus on aspects such as attractive design, cutting-edge functionality and intuitive user interfaces. But how often do we stop to think about the environmental impact of our digital creations? I confess that, for a long time, this aspect escaped my attention. That all changed when I decided to explore the environmental impact of my own website. And what I discovered left me shocked.
π₯ The call to attention
The idea of examining the environmental impact of my website came about casually. I was involved in a discussion about climate change and it occurred to me that if even large data centers consume huge amounts of energy, how much energy was my modest website consuming? So I decided to do something we rarely do: measure the environmental impact of my web pages.
π‘οΈ The shocking discovery
To begin with, I used a web performance evaluation tool to analyze my website; it was https://www.websitecarbon.com. What I discovered left me speechless: my site was slow, heavy and required a huge amount of energy to load since it was a very large blog on wordpress (50K visits per month).
π My website's carbon footprint
As I examined the data, I discovered that my website had a considerable carbon footprint. Every time someone visited my site, it emitted more CO2 than I ever thought it would. Unoptimized images, unused scripts and CSS, and a number of plugins were the problem in all of this. My website was polluting far more than I had ever imagined: every year a 99000 km trip of a car, absurd right?
All this for the mere convenience of having a ready-made wordpress website. I knew all along that it was not the best performing choice, but for convenience and the large amount of traffic, I decided to use it anyway.
I realized that if my website was so damaging, who knows how many other websites were having an even greater impact on the environment?
π± Rebirth: Toward a sustainable web
My discovery prompted me to embark on a journey toward digital sustainability. I began optimizing my websites more efficiently by reducing page loads, compressing images, and using performance-conscious technologies. I prefer to spend more time on performance rather than using old technologies that only hurt the environment.
In addition, I have decided that I will start sharing my findings with the community and encourage other developers to evaluate and improve the performance of their websites so that we can improve the environmental impact of our applications.
π¬ Always communicate π
I'm always open to dialogue and knowledge sharing on these topics. Together, we can make the web a better, faster, greener place for everyone. One website at a time.
If you have questions or would like to discuss websites environmental impact and performance, please feel free to contact me! π
Thank you
Top comments (3)
I 'm sorry but this post sounds like greenwashing to me.
A lot of people are becoming aware we are ruining the ground we walk on. And you try to use it as a way to sell your performance tech skills?
If you said you are doing performance for user experience and search engine optimalisation, I would have believed you. Who is going to visit a site if isn't on the first or second page of a search engine? Who is going to return to a site where the images are loading like you are on a dail-up modem?
Most servers are hosted in a server farm. Ironic use of the word farm because it has nothing to do with nature. They use a lot of power and water, have you thought about those environmental consequences?
I use all those things, so I'm not the good guy here. I like to improve performance for the users that visit the websites I work on. I like to improve performance so that the clients I work for get more business and/or exposure.
I'm not going to save hungry ice bears, or oil covered animals by improving the performance of websites. If you really think like that, try to think a little bit harder. Thinking is what drives developers to become better.
Most companies don't think about performance, that's the problem. Many websites don't pay particular attention to performance and still end up on the first pages of Google. Think of all the companies that use heavy images, download a lot of extra data in many cases. It shouldn't be taken for granted. I'm not selling myself as a perfect developer on performance, I'm just saying that we need to be careful about the useless data we load into our software every day. And then Yes, I also thought about green hosting, fundamental today and fortunately many hosting companies offset their emissions, these two things must come together. I think that each of us must do our part in this, those who underestimate the problem are wrong because the internet affects 4% of global pollution and I'm sure. There are the green web foundation and the green software foundation for these purposes, I recommend you take a look
I found an article with that figure, climate.selectra.com/en/environmen.... The global pollution you are talking about are greenhouse gasses. Internet is a global utility of course it is going to produce emissions.
And what is the biggest problem with the internet in that article, video. They don't mention websites.
You are right big brands don't optimize their websites, even search engines don't optimize. But all the little sites like yours and mine should?
What does offsetting mean? I always found it fishy. I produce that amount of emissions so I'm going to buy clean air/plant some trees, or something like that. It's the, it is better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission, mantra.
I'm not saying you shouldn't care about the environment, but be pragmatic about it.
Like I said before do all the optimising that you want but do it for the users, do it for the clients. Don't believe all the marketing.