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One question that comes up regularly in discussions I have is the environmental impact of a website or web app, and what can be done about it.
There are online calculators that will, in theory, give you a website’s carbon footprint, but I’m not convinced.
These calculators mostly follow the same process:
- Get the website’s page weight.
- Convert this weight to energy use.
- Convert that to CO2 (equivalent) emissions.
This is a crude proxy at best.
Page weight isn’t a great predictor of energy use; a 1MB JavaScript file that needs to be parsed and run by the user’s device could use more power than a 1MB image that just needs displaying.
Most of the energy consumption for our online habits comes from the making and the powering of our devices, the rest from data centres and networks. For example: around 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions from your phone are embodied. That means the manufacture, not the electricity consumed in day-to-day use.
Does that mean we should ignore efforts to make greener websites? No, of course not.
These calculators and web sustainability projects are great frameworks for thinking about improving the web’s footprint. But they’re not some magic solution where getting your website an A+ rating will have a measurable impact.
On the other hand, choosing web hosting powered by green energy is a better first step. As is making websites that don’t go wild with server-side computation (hello AI!). Keeping pages light will let people with older devices use your site for a long time to come and, as a bonus, will be faster to load.
Or, to take it to the extreme: does that online service even need to exist?
Colin