Website Carbon Footprint

According to this website carbon calculator, the average website produces about 1.76 grams of CO2 per page view.

Generating a million page views is the same as burning 500 kg of charcoal.

According to the same calculator, my personal website consumes 0.15g of CO2 per page view. Ten times less CO2 than the average website, is cleaner than 88% of the websites tested. And I have yet to move it off Netlify to run on renewable energy.

My website also scores 98/100 on Google PageSpeed (although the new version I’m developing has a perfect score on Google Lighthouse). 

If websites were cars, mine would be a Tesla Model S: greener and faster than most.

There is no big secret formula to obtain the same result: the more work you give to the web server, the bigger the footprint and the loading time. If the web server does nothing but listening for incoming requests, the energy consumption is minimal.

When the web was still young, servers were mostly used to send out static HTML files. Then came the need to interact with forms and databases, leading to the birth of programming languages like PHP. This complexity came with a cost.

With the rise of serverless architectures and the app boom, this need can be delegated to third-party tools. We can bring back our focus on the core of what makes a website: content.