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Web performance and eco-design, a political bias

At the beginning of 2021, Gerald Holubowicz produced an Ecoindex ranking of press sites on his blog Journalism.design. This former journalist, teacher, passionate about digital culture and new forms of writing, and now Product Owner, is very interested in the performance of websites. How can we raise awareness about our digital uses? How can we remain consistent between intentions and actions in favor of preserving the environment? We will see how webperf and energy performance come together.

What criteria can be used to measure the carbon footprint of a digital service? Are there types of sites that have more or less impact by nature, and can this be offset?

Gerald Holubowicz : The Internet has evolved and become heavier over time, but obviously, there is no question of going back to the Minitel. We have to deal with current techniques and uses in terms of user experience, design, interactivity, etc. And naturally, a blog with a small audience and little content does not have the same ecological and environmental impact as an e-commerce platform, or a press site with high traffic and lots of content. This impact can originate as much in the design of a non-optimized frontend as in a heavy infrastructure, which generate and are the subject of large volumes of requests.

Beyond the interface and technical aspects, there are many levers and tools to limit the environmental impact of a website. For example, for an e-commerce site, the nature of the items sold is important, in particular their origin and their production conditions. Adopting a total eco-responsible approach would consist of having a site that is efficient in terms of resources, and offering responsible products throughout the manufacturing and delivery chain.

Also, an industrial or digital production activity necessarily consumes resources and energy. But thinking in terms of compensation seems to me to be an interesting path, for example, by investing in initiatives in favor of the preservation of these resources that we need to design products or services.

For a media, a sector that I know best, we obviously cannot imagine doing without multimedia content (images, photos, videos, etc.) to make the pages efficient. Also, the information and traffic that these websites generate are their reason for being. Furthermore, the economy of this sector means that direct investments in favor of the environment and sustainable development seem more complicated to consider than for other markets. But I think that despite everything, we must ask ourselves the question of the coherence between what we promote and how we position ourselves in terms of energy performance .

It is with this in mind that I created this Ecoindex ranking of press sites .

What is Ecoindex?

GH: Ecoindex is a tool published by Green IT , which allows you to evaluate different performance indicators, through the impact or footprint that a website can have on the environment (editor’s note: The detailed operation is specified in this article ) . It is a plugin that can be installed on Chrome and Firefox browsers, and which inspects web pages. The higher the score, the better it is.

3 technical criteria are observed: 

  • the number of requests during loading; 
  • the weight of the page, including images, sound files, text files, multimedia files, JavaScript, etc.;
  • the size of the DOM.

Ecoindex also indicates the volume of water consumed and the emission of greenhouse gases (GHG) to deliver the tested web page.

This score does not replace a detailed audit, but it is very useful for comparing with similar websites in its ecosystem.

And so I come back to the approach of my project: the press conveys a certain number of values ​​on the preservation of the environment, so we might as well help it to enter a virtuous circle by becoming aware of what could be improved! This is the meaning of what I mentioned a little earlier about responsibility and compensation.

Ecoindex allowed me to make a technical synthesis and compare French media sites on a coherent basis. I did it on press titles, but it can be done on any other sector, and also on other aspects – besides, I am looking for a tool that would allow me to make the same synthesis on accessibility . 

Behind all these issues of performance, resource preservation and accessibility, my idea is to highlight the fact that in the design of a digital product, there is a political element at play, and the way it is designed is a position taken . The performance of a digital service, or its lack of performance, has an impact that goes well beyond individual use.

Can web performance help limit the ecological and environmental impact of digital technology? 

GH: Naturally, the lack of optimization has an impact. Conversely, the faster a site is, the lighter the web pages are, the less energy and resources they consume for a server and for the end user. In terms of design, this involves a lightweight DOM, reducing the number of requests, compressing images , optimizing the code (HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.), but also a sober design.

Furthermore, as the creators of Ecoindex point out, terminals have the greatest impact on the environment compared to network infrastructures and data centers .

However, web performance, or frontend optimization , can actually have a positive impact on mobile usage. If a website is too demanding for old hardware, the CPU and battery will be over-revving and owners of less powerful smartphones will be frustrated by their experience on slowed-down sites. 

Making a site fast and efficient, and therefore optimizing its loading speed, is a necessity to ensure equal access to a digital service.

If a site is heavy and therefore slow, there will inevitably be a gap between people who are equipped with a high-performance mobile and those who have an entry-level mobile. In addition, implicitly, these owners of low-performance or old mobile phones will be invited to throw it away to buy a new one that is faster, which creates waste and contributes to producing more and more devices while those in circulation are in working order.

Web performance must make it possible to respond to some of the important issues relating to our way of consuming: the perpetual changes of devices and their lifespan, but also the titanic consumption of resources and energy to power the server farms which provide our online services.

Will technological progress allow us to move towards greater sobriety to reduce our ecological footprint, or are we going in the opposite direction?

GH  : I hope we’re finally moving in the right direction! Here’s one example of an improvement I’d like to see, especially for sites that need to archive large volumes of data over long periods of time – and media is one of them. It would be a real benefit to be able to automatically make archive pages static to save storage space, and therefore use fewer resources to store and serve them. At the moment, none of the CMSs I use offer this option. That would be a real improvement!

Today, in digital technologies, innovations follow one another, but not the questions that should go with them.

I’m thinking of NFTs, for example. Bitcoin is currently ranked 143rd in the world in terms of energy consumption, ahead of some countries like Lithuania. Given the interest that NFTs present in authenticating, valuing and monetizing tangible and intangible products, I imagine that the press will find it difficult to escape them. But then, what about energy dependence?! 

I really compare this situation to what we experienced in the 80s and 90s with the development and craze for all kinds of aerosol sprays for hygiene, killing mosquitoes, etc. Until the moment when we realized that we were making a hole in the ozone layer.

However, the good news is that there is also an awareness on the part of some users. Responsibility and critical thinking are developing around digital technology and its impacts on the environment, and companies really have an interest in anticipating this movement.

For digital services, we are also seeing progress in terms of interface design, with Dark screen or Dark UI modes . These are good practices, and perhaps one day they will evolve to reach the black pixel that consumes nothing… Although this certainly poses other problems in terms of design and accessibility. There is necessarily a balance to be found, but in any case, it is a very good thing that reflection is emerging, and that the subject of energy savings is finally becoming preponderant.

Responsible management of a digital service must be able to be done in the same way as social responsibility, quality of life at work, equality, etc. 

Despite the desire to align intentions and actions, sometimes compromises must be made on the choice of certain service providers, graphic biases, etc., but being aware of them at least allows us to know what we must compensate for. And this is exactly the objective of the ranking that I have carried out: to initiate reflection on our practices and see how to improve them.

I would conclude on an important point: improving does not mean doing more, it can mean doing better, and sometimes less.

In this sense, I invite you to discover the site solar.lowtechmagazine.com, which runs on solar energy. It is a beautiful example of technological minimalism. When there is not enough sun to power the panels that run the servers, the site is simply down . Deep down, maybe we should get out of the habit of everything being always available. Do we really need servers that run 24/7?

At Fasterize, we also believe that site performance is part of best practices for greater digital sobriety. Optimizing the frontend for fast and lightweight pages helps reduce the demand for resources on the server side and even more so on the client side.

You should know that digital represents 3.8% of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, 0.2% of water consumption and 5.5% of electricity consumption ( 2019 global figures ). Do these orders of magnitude seem unimportant to you? Well, know that if digital were a country, it would have about 2 to 3 times the footprint of France. We therefore have a role to play in limiting this environmental impact, and webperf is one of the levers!

Are you interested in web performance? Want to dig deeper into the subject? Subscribe to our newsletter and receive our news every month!

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