Discussion on "Is your website climate-friendly?"

Brock Herion · 2022-07-02T13:33:29.062Z

Did you know that websites have carbon footprints? It makes sense if you think about it. Every time you visit a site, you are making a request to a server for data. Each server takes some amount of energy to send that content back to you. Thus, every...

how about performance test? where do you and most fellow developers you know test site's performance?

This is great stuff! I hope Google decides to add some kind of carbon calculator to Lighthouse: we can't fix what we don't measure.

For what it's worth, the Core Performance Team at wordpress.org offers a Performance Lab plugin to do stuff like convert images to the lighter-weight webp format, and many other things. wordpress.org/plugins/performance-lab

(Yeah, I know, WordPress is old tech. But, it's not dead yet. It still powers something like 40% of the websites on the web by website count not traffic. So there's a LOT of carbon-saving leverage to be had by making it more efficient.)

Yeah absolutely! Optimizing existing tech helps with performance (which is always a plus) and with reducing energy usage when running. It's a win-win!

This is good stuff, thanks for bringing it to everybody's attention.

Lots of back-end-heavy websites are out there, burning power in datacenter servers and databases as well as routers, fiber-optic drivers, and end-user computers. I personally have been working on making WordPress's database operations faster and more efficient. There's lots of CO2 leverage there because there are many of those sites. (Yeah, we could outlaw WordPress because it's a power hog, but, that won't work.)

It's time for everybody to start thinking about web power footprint!

It was great article Brock Herion, I really enjoying your writing style 🥰 And theme of green web is very interesting, keep going!

I have never seen anyone writing about being green on the web. Really nice to see someone taking the time and writing about it. Thanks Brock Herion🤗

wow! thanks for this

I've never thought about that!

As other people mentioned in the comments, it's nice to see someone writing about it.

Every small action count and the climate crisis is real, so let's make our website friendlier :)

Thank you, Eleftheria! It's not something I had thought about either until I was reading through some of the literature on Plausible. It's something so small but makes so much sense. And you are right, every action, no matter how small, goes a long way in fighting climate change

Since next.js isn't made for static websites but for SSR first, it's pretty clear why that carbon energy is generated. Using static site builders is an improvement since the content can be cached at the CDN level as well, so the user traffic travels very little and no server rendering for the request has to be done. And in addition to that using something like cloudflare pages to host your static site is the most green option there is since they themselves are fully green i believe but they also provide you with a carbon report. Anyways, great writeup.

Absolutely! Next is a great tool, but there are other options for static sites that just do it better. I'm curious about using Cloudflare pages though, Chris also mentioned them being a green platform. Definitely going to look into it!

Agree with the comments, super happy to see someone write about being green on the web.

It's been an aspiration of myself to write about this, as I do take it into account.

Pro tip: Are hosting this via cloudflare pages? They provide a carbon emission report. I think they where even 100% green last year if I recall correctly.

Thanks for inspiring me to put it on my backlog 🥳

Hey Chris, you're welcome! Always happy to provide some inspiration every now and again 😁

I am not hosting on Cloudflare pages. I'm using Vercel for my hosting, but I'm eager to give pages a try. I had no idea they did carbon emission reports! Definitely going to give it a try now

Amazing read! Thanks for sharing this Brock Herion🚀

You're welcome Rohini! Glad you enjoyed it

Damn, that didn't go well for a Next.js enthusiast😅

Hey, I still love Next.js! Like I said tho, brockherion.dev is a mostly static site. Next is able to handle it without so much as breaking a sweat, but there are just some tools that do it a little bit better.

Great write up.

At first, I wonder what a website has to do with that 😁. But after reading, I know how important it is.

Thank you, Jeremy! Yeah, I didn't stumble on this idea until I was reading more about Plausible and its mission.

And that's just the beginning! Web technologies account for as many carbon emissions as all the airplanes in the world! The good news is that by doing stuff like Brock shares here, and specially by hosting your website/web application in a green cloud provider (e.g. AWS has three zones on the way to being 100% powered by renewable emergy, and there's other green cloud providers), you can really make a difference.

It's fantastic to see someone else blogging on green web and sustainability!

Loved your 90% emissions reduction: it shows how it doesn't take a lot to make a big difference.

You might even want to add your website to this fantastic directory of low carbon websites. I know the maintainers are always looking for more! lowww.directory

Also, for more techniques to combine low emissions with high interactivity, I found this to be a fantastic resource: awwwards.com/how-to-deliver-a-highly-emotional-an…

Hope you keep diving into this area. We need as many devs as possible to mainstream green software. Feel free to reach out any time.

Thank you so much Ismael! It just goes to show that no matter who you are or where you came from, we can all do our part to help create a greener, most sustainable world.

I'm not seeing the links you provided though. I would love to take a look at them!

Brock Herion odd, have a look at my post on getting started as a climate friendly dev, where I have a bunch of links you might find useful, including the ones I weirdly forgot to add! It's my first blog post here, so any feedback hugely appreciated!

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Is your website climate-friendly?

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