🐾 The carbon footprint of modern websites

Why care about that ?

According to The shift project, in 2023, digital technologies were responsible for 4% of total gas emission in the world, increasing its own by 9% every year. Even though it isn't the first cause of global warming, recent events such as forest fire in Los Angeles, devastation in Mayotte or floodings in Valencia can urge any human being to rethink their own impact on the planet, and I think web and digital workers can definitely have a major role towards a better future, such as promoting and using the correct tools within the community and towards theirs clients, or by spreading the word and engage themselves in the ecological cause.

Progress is not only for the better

Web technologies and web as itself is very powerful and an amazing tool. But I do think that the past few years, its usage has been promoting a vision of life and of economy that I think is truly spiteful. Cryptocurrencies mining, NFTs, or more recently the whole «Artificial Intelligence» breakthrough, all have a devastating impact on web philosophy, web usage, and are all very polluting. If you have seen some web related advertisement lately, you may have crossed a lot of AI b%llsh%t.

Even if we put their questionable moral values aside (neocapitalism that favours social inequalities, content stealing, fake news spreading, et cetera), new technologies can harm our planet and our civilisation if dealt irresponsibly. I made the choice to reduce my usage of AI, and to seek progress in the open-source community that have a strong, lightweight, public and accessible vision of the World Wide Web. My first step towards a more sustainable web might be to support, donate or participate in projects I morally believe in.

My personal impact

But what about my own impact on our beautiful blue planet? How do I find how, how much, and how can I act in a more positive way? Apart from having an existential crisis about the world. I tend to think that those solutions must be debated in society. I believe the ecological impact must be regulated globally and not individually. But I also think that, if you engage yourself just a little bit, and that this engagement becomes a part of who you are and how you communicate or work, you can slightly make a difference, on your scale.

So I tried to check the impact of my more recent projects, and I was excited when I put the results of this blog on the Website Carbon Calculator. Though I was not surprised since it is lightweight and that Static Site Generators are in that matter very efficient (11ty).

But, in the other hand, when I tested it for another project hosted on a LAMP server that I rent to Hetzner, I was upset by the results. I thought it was not such a big deal, but I was wrong, it seems that it consumes a lot too much comparing to the relatively small scale of the project.

What can I do about it ?

Now that I know how much even a simple Craft CMS project can consume when it is deployed online, how can I make sure that this website I made respects my knew found convictions?

Check the server provider's green policy

The first thing I did when I saw the result was to see how Hetzner made the electricity to run their servers, and it turns out it's apparently quite renewable! I was happy since I chose their service because they had servers very close to my location. However, it is not yet the best eco-friendly solution. For my future projects, I might switch to Krystal, Leap or Positive Internet

Optimize my Craft CMS

The provider only allocates some calculation process and data storage to the customers. Then it is also the responsibility of the developer to deliver the most cost-efficient code, so that the website is optimized nicely. Keeping PHP and Craft CMS up to date seems like a good start. I can also install a Carbon Emissions Tracker plugin to my project so I can analyze where I need to improve the ecological impact of my pages.

Minimalism

Sometimes your client seems to need a ton of stuff and might actually not need them a 100%, maybe a good path towards a better web is to be minimalist about the needs of your clients (I mean, on a single freelancer scale). 11ty is amazing in that matter, and I might just get deeper and deeper into it since it allows you to start from the ground up and build functionalities accordingly to the needs of the project. Craft CMS is great, but is an already built engine that comes with its dependencies. There is no need to use a car to go to the bakery next door, since you can find good bikes that are a lot cheaper.

Day by day

I realize that I'm quite a newbie about all these questions, these are all heated thoughts I had while learning about the recent catastrophes that has occured in LA. But I needed to put substance to my thoughts and to write them somewhere, so why not this blog post I made and used once ? I hope you enjoyed this topic, and thank you for reading me! I hope you'll have a delightful day (by day).