How do you make your site sustainable and green

[chilblands]

I came across a few resources on optimising your site = less resources to load the site! Inspired by a Reddit user u/Mevdik on r/Neocities who are passionate about optimising website for people with bad internet connection. Upon finding out, I've been scrambling to compress files, remove redundancies and self-host files as best as I can. I also found out why iframe for new webmasters might not be a good idea because it take up so much memory... loading="lazy", just found out what it does.

Edit: some graders: Eco Grader and Website Carbon

Apparently, there is also more consumer choices you can make to make with webmastering according to Greenweb Foundation by supporting hosting/domain services that run on sustainable power! You can look at their directory and find green services in your local country. I wonder if it is legit but I would assume small services would have better customer services and you are supporting local businesses.

What are some things you do to optimise your websites?

[futurearcana]

My static websites don't have any particular optimization beyond what you mentioned, but for more complex web applications something that is often overlooked is browser side caching.

In particular for applications that call APIs asynchronously via js, caching reduces page load times and server load significantly.

[poesu]

I'm gonna list a few techniques that are not necessarily directly impact my website, but also my workflow.

Besides what you you already mentioned:

• FastStone Image Viewer for batch resizing images.
• Compress images to .webp. I use this one and run it locally to also save on bandwidth and thus on electricity.
• Coding in Notepad++, which is incredibly lightweight saving on electricity.
• To get hex codes I use Microsoft Paint, which is also lightweight and offline.
• Hosting fonts instead of pinging Google all the time.
• Blocking AI scraping (look into how to do that specifically with Bing) as much as I can, which I assume overall reduces their impact however small. It must be noted that a lot of bots don't respect robots.txt, but if I can block at least some, I think it's worth it. Also some of my pages are entirely hidden from search engines by <meta name="robots" content="none"> in the head.

My website still gets an atrocious rating on Website Carbon though I should look more into this issue. Maybe I can compress images even more (in the programme I linked you can adjust the quality), idk.

Another issue is that I use Glaze to protect my artworks from LLMs and it uses a ton of my PC's resources. It's kinda ironic that to combat LLMs that are devastating to the environment I'm using a tool that is also power-hungry… Although the impact of running this programme is still much, much smaller and I have to use it pretty rarely.

[sunnyp4rk]

I haven't tested my subdomains (though I imagine they'd be the same with the exception of one), my site has an A on Website Carbon. I generally keep my images compressed and small, which probably helps. It helps being able to serve the same header across pages with PHP (no iFrame shenanigans). My favorite image compressor is this one and it's been very useful for me for years. Should probably do another run through of my site pages with it.

[Melooon]

iframe for new webmasters might not be a good idea because it take up so much memory

pages with PHP (no iFrame shenanigans)

Oooggggh, there's this constant weird anti-frame war going on and it's really not ok. Yes an iFrame is the same as a tab, so it uses a whole tab worth of RAM, however ram usage has 0% impact on your computers power usage. Secondly, using PHP is absolutely not more environmental than having an extra tab open It requires a far more complex server doing extra processing on PHP pages before they are served, and most people don't know how to cache or optimize PHP - it has many good uses, but environmentalism is not one of them.

That rant aside My sites are always in the top 1% worst offenders for power usage on those site testers (ecograder gave me an F) There's a direct link between a heavy site and a site that really pushes the limits of what a browser can be. A bit like a demolition derby; if energy's getting burnt, I'd rather blast it on something I love, than sip it on something I don't. I'd say the question is less, "what do you do to make your site weigh less" (the easiest option is not to have a site), and more, "how do you direct that energy use into things that matter". That's what those testers don't test for, and it's what they can't see.

[chilblands]

Oooggggh, there's this constant weird anti-frame war going on and it's really not ok. Yes an iFrame is the same as a tab, so it uses a whole tab worth of RAM, however ram usage has 0% impact on your computers power usage. Secondly, using PHP is absolutely not more environmental than having an extra tab open It requires a far more complex server doing extra processing on PHP pages before they are served, and most people don't know how to cache or optimize PHP - it has many good uses, but environmentalism is not one of them.

That rant aside My sites are always in the top 1% worst offenders for power usage on those site testers (ecograder gave me an F) There's a direct link between a heavy site and a site that really pushes the limits of what a browser can be. A bit like a demolition derby; if energy's getting burnt, I'd rather blast it on something I love, than sip it on something I don't. I'd say the question is less, "what do you do to make your site weigh less" (the easiest option is not to have a site), and more, "how do you direct that energy use into things that matter". That's what those testers don't test for, and it's what they can't see.

I have no problems with iFrames fyi your site is fast as hell considering how many images there are! I browsed through a handful of sites that caused my laptop to freeze!! Too many thingymajiggies >:(

That is a good point on the grading system. Realistically a personal website wouldn't emit that much carbon anyways and those tools are most likely made for corporate websites (maybe that's why most of them look the same). People shouldn't be worried or feel limited in their creativity to be eco-friendly. Although compressing files does seem to have a lot of benefits

Should probably do another run through of my site pages with it.

My website still gets an atrocious rating on Website Carbon though I should look more into this issue. Maybe I can compress images even more (in the programme I linked you can adjust the quality), idk.

Your websites are eco-friendly in my book I hope I didn't instill a standard of perfectionism! Both of your websites are PERFECT! You both put a lot of effort in making sure your websites are accessible AND IT IS no changed needed, perfect the way it is 

[poesu]

There's a direct link between a heavy site and a site that really pushes the limits of what a browser can be. [...] I'd say the question is less, "what do you do to make your site weigh less" [...], and more, "how do you direct that energy use into things that matter". That's what those testers don't test for, and it's what they can't see.

That makes so much sense actually! The vast majority of emissions are produced by corpos, not personal sites/passion projects…

Also, I've just run Ecograder and it flat out makes some stuff up… I do not minify my CSS and JS, yet the report tells me they're minified. Maybe my code is so good it couldn't spot the difference Also it throws errors if I try to scan obviously heavy websites like marketplaces, lol. I wonder what kind of websites does it even crawl to generate their stats on global averages? I guess the only way to get a better score there is to remove all images entirely, 'cuz yeah no shit these rank higher, lol.

Your websites are eco-friendly in my book  I hope I didn't instill a standard of perfectionism! Both of your websites are PERFECT!

[larvapuppy]

My homepage has a D on Eco Grader, but an A on Website Carbon. 

I guess this mostly came as a reminder that I can compress my images even further. I just did that on the homepage and I'm considering dithering my artwork previews. But it's hard to find a good balance between sustainability and usability when my site is primarily used for hosting visual art.

Building on what poesu said, the biggest offenders for emissions online are LLMs and the large social media sites. Any site that has a million unnecessary trackers, scripts, content-serving algorithms, etc burns many times more fossil fuels than a small personal site. And most of us know about the environmental impact of LLMs by now. But we feel powerless to change anything about that, those companies are so large, so many people use their services... aside from abstaining from using LLMs and social media, what can we do?

I think one thing we could all easily do is get in contact with our webhosts and ask them to power their servers with renewable energy sources. How about starting petitions, one to Neocities and one to Nekoweb? They aren't as large or frequently visited as social media, but it would still make a big impact. We could create a guild about it on here and collaborate on the petitions, get people to spread the word, etc.

Changes made to our individual sites do help slightly as outlined by those eco-scorers, but if we really want to make a difference we should work together on this.

edit: I also find it a little ironic that Website Carbon suggests we embed a badge on all of our webpages with a script that calculates the CO2 emissions of the page every time someone visits, thus adding to the weight of the pages... does anyone else see the problem with this? 

[Melooon]

webhosts and ask them to power their servers with renewable energy sources

Some VERY big web hosts like Google do have their own power production abilities at data centers, but most of them run off national power grids, so they will only operate on renewable energy if the region/nation they are in as a whole is using renewable energy, same as ur house. For something like Neocities, they prob have mirror servers in the US, EU and Asia, so it'll depend what those regions are up to.

There is generally great info on that though, so for example I know this site is hosted in Dublin, so it will be operating at with 14% renewable electricity because that's what's available


Image compression is great for making your site load faster and feel nicer, but its environmental cost is really very small Images are cached on people computers the first time they load and after that they are not sent again.

However, I did do some very sketchy research; MelonLand transmits about 1.5TB of data per month ~ 150 million hits per month (this is VAST compared to a personal site), every result I could find said that it costs about 0.05kWh of energy per GB, so that's 75kWh of energy per month used just to transmit MelonLand site traffic.. that equivalent to apparently between 20-40kg of CO2 - that's apparently the same as driving around 1 hour in a car. Just guessing from those numbers, the average personal site's total bandwidth a month is prob producing the same CO2 a car driving for half a second

[sunnyp4rk]

Oooggggh, there's this constant weird anti-frame war going on and it's really not ok. Yes an iFrame is the same as a tab, so it uses a whole tab worth of RAM, however ram usage has 0% impact on your computers power usage.

I don't think iFrames are inherently bad or anything. I just dislike how they're used on many sites I've visited that use them. Like, yours is fine, I don't have a problem with how they're used in your site's case, but there are other sites where it's annoying to browse because they're used.

I'm not really sure where I was going with the PHP point looking back on it. I did write that post sometime in the early morning after I woke up lol

[arcus]

I use palette indexed GIFs and PNGs compressed with Gifsicle and pngcrush on my site. I don't pay for hosting and instead rely on shared hosts (pubnix.) I designed it to be lightweight and compatible with older browsers in mind, it being less environmentally harmful is a bonus.

Oooggggh, there's this constant weird anti-frame war going on and it's really not ok.

iFrames are not supported in all browsers, are difficult to navigate using screen readers, and are annoying to navigate while zoomed in.

And most of us know about the environmental impact of LLMs by now. But we feel powerless to change anything about that, those companies are so large, so many people use their services... aside from abstaining from using LLMs and social media, what can we do?

Check out and share The AI Resist List and Brockovich AI Data Center Reporting (USA only.)

Unrelated to AI, I suggest researching, emailing, and changing banks. Many banks finance fossil fuel and animal agriculture. The latter has a much greater impact on the environment than AI.

I think one thing we could all easily do is get in contact with our webhosts and ask them to power their servers with renewable energy sources. How about starting petitions, one to Neocities and one to Nekoweb? They aren't as large or frequently visited as social media, but it would still make a big impact. We could create a guild about it on here and collaborate on the petitions, get people to spread the word, etc.

I will support this, but I'm doubtful if either Neocities or Nekoweb would follow through with it. Neocities relies on Amazon for storage and Nekoweb uses Cloudflare despite everything.