Heatwaves and Homepages

This heatwave got me thinking about a question I get sometimes: how do I make my website greener? Lately some people have even been hiring "green web design" agencies to tell them.

The good news: yes, do it – but not because it’ll save the planet. Do it because an overweight website is a tax on your users. And, yes, most websites are bloated.

A leaner site works in a train tunnel, on a five-year-old laptop, or on the terrible wifi at a conference centre. But it also happens to emit less carbon per visit.

A study of 100 Thai websites found a 126× spread: from 0.21g to 26.62g CO2 per page load. And the reason wasn't a planned sustainability strategy, it was just less requests: oversized images, tracking scripts, CRM widgets, heavy video…

But, and it’s a big one: unless you're Amazon, shaving bytes off a page load is not where the climate math lives. The bigger wins are in using green hosting, in not hoarding tons of dark data that will never be read by man or machine, and above all in refusing to bolt generative AI features onto everything just because the vendor sales deck says you should. Compute is not free, thermodynamically speaking.

Optimise your site. Your visitors will thank you, especially the ones on poor connections (that’s all of us at some point), and so will your bounce rate.

Just don’t let "we compressed our JPEGs" become the whole feel-good sustainability story, or an alibi to avoid less comfortable conversations about hosting, hoarding, and hype.

Colin