This is a low carbon website, designed and built to use less energy and fewer resources.

The homepage uses up 1.7g of CO2 equivalent every time it loads. The site shrinks image sizes and makes pages smaller and static. The net outcome is a fast, easy-to-use and green website.

On a daily basis, I think of digital products as clean, quiet objects. They are smooth, slick, and polished, like shiny rocks with bright emanating lights flying off their flat front sides. The process of making them is hidden from us. They don’t look like they emerged from the dirty, messy and stinky murk of mines, machinery and masks. But it takes a tremendous amount of energy to make these devices — phones, desktops, laptops, tablets, wearables. And it takes a lot of energy to power them, too.

As someone who very early started thinking about the digital — and carbon — footprint of personal and business work, I created the website Serving.Green with my team at Manoverboard along with partners Mightybytes in Chicago and Third Partners in New York. In 2016, people were just starting to think about the environmental impact of the Internet on climate change. Low energy websites and digital responsibility are now crucial parts of the conversation of design.

Emails, searches, and online reading require a lot of energy to power data farms which hold servers (essentially thin, headless computers). Cooling all of these servers, which sometimes live in the middle of deserts, is hard on our planet. The Carbon Literacy Project estimates that a long email that takes 10 minutes to write and 3 minutes to read uses 17 g of C02e. That means that the average person’s email usage is equivalent to driving a small car for 128 miles.

You might think that websites do not use much energy. Surprisingly, they do. The entire Internet, including websites, video and related downloads, uses about the same amount of energy as the entire U.K. each year.

I recognize that this particular site is not the recipient of millions of page views per day. It has a low carbon footprint by its very nature with under a million visitors a year! 🙂 Nevertheless, the art of the everyday — design — is achieved when there is a minimal environmental impact with maximum effect. And that’s what I am hoping for here.

By comparison, my favourite low carbon website, Low-tech Magazine has an average of .40g CO2 per page view. My site has an average of 0.12g CO2 per page view (measured by averaging 12 pages in April 2024); this is significantly lower (about 1/4 Low-tech’s carbon per page).

Here’s what I did to get this result:

• Manually reduce main images from JPEG or PNG format to WebP using CloudConvert
• Use a WordPress plug-in called Simply Static that converts the pages on this site to smaller, static pages of HTML and CSS
• Install a minimal number of typefaces — see Colophon
• No use of animation, complex menus or other code-rich complexity; this should make finding and digesting content easy (hey, check out the short [About] (/about/) page)
• Only use whatever visual assets I need for the site and do my best to delete digital detritus
• Make files small when they can be small; for instance, my resume is in HTML not a PDF or Word document
• Serve the site on Dreamhost, which is powered by renewable energy