#177 – Charlotte Bax on Reducing Your Website’s Carbon Footprint

Transcript

[00:00:19] Nathan Wrigley: Welcome to the Jukebox Podcast from WP Tavern. My name is Nathan Wrigley.

Jukebox is a podcast which is dedicated to all things WordPress, the people, the events, the plugins, the blocks, the themes, and in this case, reducing your WordPress website’s carbon footprint.

If you’d like to subscribe to the podcast, you can do that by searching for WP Tavern in your podcast player of choice, or by going to wptavern.com/feed/podcast. And you can copy that URL into most podcast players.

If you have a topic that you’d like us to feature on the podcast, I’m keen to hear from you and hopefully get you, or your idea, featured on the show. Head to wptavern.com/contact/jukebox, and use the form there.

So on the podcast today we have Charlotte Bax. Charlotte is a sustainable web designer with a background in both environmentally conscious living and technology. Beginning her journey as a sustainable lifestyle blogger, she soon merged her passion for sustainability with her skills in web design, rebranding herself as Digihobbit.

For several years now, Charlotte has been focused on building websites that prioritize low carbon footprints, and she is also the founder of the climate tech startup ENNOR Toolbox for Online Sustainability, which helps measure the CO2 emissions of websites and web applications.

When we made this recording, Charlotte had just finished presenting at WordCamp Europe on the topic of how to make your website more sustainable, and her presentation is the topic of the podcast today.

We talk about digital environmental impact, the hidden pollution our websites create through their energy use and infrastructure. Charlotte explains some striking facts about the carbon footprint of ICT, noting that if the internet were a country, it would be the seventh largest polluter globally.

She shares a wide array of practical steps for web professionals to reduce the environmental impact of their sites. You’ll hear about the benefits of green web hosting, using modern image formats like WebP and AVIF, optimizing architecture and UX to minimize unnecessary page loads, the crucial role of caching, as well as some new innovations like grid aware websites, which adapt themselves based on the renewable energy mix available to users in real time.

The conversation also touches on Charlotte’s involvement in WordPress sustainability initiatives. The importance of multiplying small improvements across high traffic sites, and the moral imperative web creators have to help shape a greener internet.

If you’ve ever wondered how digital choices impact the planet, and what steps you can take to help, this episode is for you.

If you’re interested in finding out more, you can find all of the links in the show notes by heading to wptavern.com/podcast, where you’ll find all the other episodes as well.

And so. Without further delay, I bring you Charlotte Bax.

I am joined on the podcast by Charlotte Bax. Hello Charlotte.

[00:03:29] Charlotte Bax: Hello Nathan, and thank you for having me.

[00:03:31] Nathan Wrigley: You are very welcome. Charlotte and I are having a conversation at WordCamp Europe. We’re in Basel, and we’re going to be talking today about the environmental impact of your website, whether that be WordPress, or any other platform that you might be using.

In order to establish your credential, Charlotte, would you just for maybe a minute or something like that, just tell us a little bit about you, your relationship with technology. And I guess if you lean into your sustainability credentials, what you’ve been doing in the past, that would be helpful too.

[00:03:59] Charlotte Bax: Yes. Well, I started out as a sustainable lifestyle blogger, really, like in 2000 and something. And I didn’t really feel like I was at the right place in my work at that time. I was doing a job at the service center for ICT. It was really overwhelming. So I decided to make my hobby into my work and I chose the web design side. And after only a year, I think I stumbled upon a sustainable website challenge by some Dutch guys, that I got to know them. And that was the missing link between my sustainable lifestyle and my work as a web designer.

So I really went down that digital sustainability rabbit hole, and I sort of rebranded myself as a sustainable web designer in the name of Digihobbit. Well, so I’m building sustainable websites for quite some years now.

Two years ago, I really wanted a tool to make estimating the CO2 emissions of websites easier because, for example, Website Carbon by Whole Grain Digital, I love that tool. And there’s also some other tools I really loved, but you have to copy paste every single page of a website in there.

So I wanted a tool to do that in bulk. So I asked a friend to build me a tool to do that really easily, and he did. And that sort of escalated into a full blown startup. So since August, 2024, I also have a climate tech startup called ENNOR Toolbox for Online Sustainability, in which we build software to measure the CO2 emissions of websites and web applications.

[00:05:37] Nathan Wrigley: Wow, that’s fascinating. You’re the first person that I’ve spoken to who’s actually finished their talk at WordCamp Europe. Your presentation was, I’m sure you know, how to make your website more sustainable. So very quickly, how did it go?

[00:05:49] Charlotte Bax: It was amazing. Like the room was so full. It was such an amazing experience, and it went so good. And yeah, I’m just still riding that high.

[00:05:59] Nathan Wrigley: Do you feel, I mean, obviously there’s tons of topics on here and there’s many, many tracks, and the fact that you filled yours up, do you sense that sustainability is a thing which web developers are latching onto, that they find important, that they’re curious about?

[00:06:14] Charlotte Bax: Yes, I think so. Especially the curiosity part. I’ve done presentations in the Netherlands also for some government entities, and there were some senior developers. They talked to me afterwards and they said like, I have never thought of this before. Just, yeah, like spreading that awareness, planting those seeds. I think really nice to do that.

[00:06:34] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think that it’s a topic which many people will not even have given any thought to. Because, we were talking just before we hit record about how clean and sterile our technology feels in our lives. You know, I’m staring at a laptop, and I’ve got a microphone in my hand, I’ve got a phone over to my side here, and none of it emits anything by itself.

You know, it’s clean. If I hold it in my hand, I’m not going to breathe any toxic fumes in from it. And yet all of the technology that we’re surrounded by in some way, shape, or form will have been produced, there’ll be some pollution that’s associated with that. But also particularly around ICT, the mere fact that it’s switched on and is consuming electricity, well, that electricity has to be generated in some way.

And you put a really interesting statistic on the blurb for your presentation, which says that 8 to 10% of all energy, and I think I’m saying that right, yeah, all energy that’s produced globally, 8 to 10% is related to ICT. I would never have suspected it because it’s completely divorced. I switch my computer on, there’s no pollution in my house because of that. It’s happening elsewhere.

So how does ICT rate? If it’s 8 to 10%, where does it sort of slot into all the other industries?

[00:07:57] Charlotte Bax: Well, it’s more than aviation. There’s this book, Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood. There is this graph somewhere, quite in the beginning, that puts the internet, if it were a country, it would be the seventh biggest polluter in the world. So that’s really, really big. And you don’t see it because all the pollution happens elsewhere. Like, you don’t have a data center, or an energy plant, in your backyard. It’s all hidden away. Or there’s those big boxes next to the highway, you know? You don’t see it. And in Dutch we call it far from your bed show. And that is a really nice comparison I think.

[00:08:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think if I was to ask you to stand behind my car and I rev the engine, so I use the car, you are going to be really reluctant to stand behind my car because you know that out of the back of the car is coming a lot of terrible gases that you don’t wish to consume. And yet my computer, in a remote destination that I am not standing anywhere near, is doing basically the same thing.

[00:09:05] Charlotte Bax: More or less.

[00:09:06] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I mean it may not be the same gases or what have you, but there is a pollution component to that.

[00:09:10] Charlotte Bax: Yes, there’s a pollution component indeed.

[00:09:11] Nathan Wrigley: But every bit of technology that I own, I sense none of that. And so that’s a really interesting disconnect. And I guess that promotes us, well, not promotes us, I guess it allows us to ignore the problem because we do not see it.

[00:09:28] Charlotte Bax: Yes. That is exactly the right wording for that. It allows us to ignore it because we do not see it. It’s not just like there’s this energy usage, for example, data centers and routers and your own devices, of course. But there’s also so much more. There’s this embodied carbon from producing all that hardware. And that’s not just the machines that we see around us, your laptop, my laptop, your phone. It’s also like the data centres, the servers, the wifi box, the routers, satellites, et cetera, cables.

Producing electronics is really dirty. It takes up a lot of resources and energy. Data centers, they use up a lot of water for cooling. And at the end of the day, most of those things, they become e-waste, because electronics don’t get recycled that much yet.

[00:10:21] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I guess given the nature of this podcast, we probably won’t focus on all of the different bits and pieces that are involved in all of that. You know, we can’t talk so much about how a phone ought to be recycled. Well, we could, but we are going to talk about websites.

And again, the disconnect is so profound. I go to a website, any website, there is no connection in my head between browsing that website and the consequences to the environment. Essentially, in my head, and probably the heads of many people listening to this podcast, it’s entirely benign. I’m doing no harm whatsoever. Of course, on some level, intellectually, if I apply thought to it, of course I know that I am, but it’s way easier for me to ignore that.

So then that leads to the question, what on earth can people like you, like me, like the people listening to this podcast who create websites, what on earth can they do? What are the little things that they can pick out that they can change about their website in order to make them less polluting, more sustainable, whichever term you’d like to use?

[00:11:26] Charlotte Bax: Oh boy. I don’t think we have enough time in this podcast to touch on all of that. But in my talk I sort of, yeah, I had a list of certain areas where you could make sustainable choices, and they also arrange really widely. For example, your web hosting, choose a green web host. It makes such a difference. Renewable energy. Not all web hosts are hosting on green energy. And there is this really nice organisation, the Green Web Foundation, they have this database of web hosting providers that are using renewable energy.

And they have a tool, you can put in your website and see if your website runs on renewables. And if you are a web hosting provider, you can send evidence to the Green Web Foundation that your data centers are running on renewables, so they can add you to that database, which is also very good for your reputation as a web host.

[00:12:23] Nathan Wrigley: Right, okay. So as you say the things that you mentioned in your talk, I’ll throw them back at you just so that we’re absolutely certain what we’re talking about.

So every website obviously, well, most of them need some kind of hosting environment. And what you’re saying is go out and be proactive. Look for this badge, this Green Web Foundation badge. They’ve done the hard work, if you like. You can be certain that if there’s a Green Web Foundation sticker on there, there has been an exchange, to and fro, between the host and the Green Web Foundation, and they classify that as sustainable. What does that mean? Does it mean that, like, is it 80% of their energy consumption is renewable or a hundred percent or do you know?

[00:12:59] Charlotte Bax: I don’t know that exactly. You should ask Chris Adams. But they’re also, yeah, I learned that also from that book from Tom Greenwood. You can make a difference between certain ways of using renewable energy, such as like actually producing your own renewable energy by having solar panels on the data center, for example.

You can invest in green energy. You can buy it from a green energy supplier.

And there’s a fourth thing, and it is that you buy certificates from other countries and that, yeah, I think that’s greenwashing.

But as far as I know, they don’t show that yet in the Green Web Foundation database. I have contacted them like months, maybe more than a year ago about it, whether they would do that. And they were open to the idea. I think someone was even working on it. But it just takes a long time because they are not a commercial party of course. They also just run on subsidies and they have just so many resources.

[00:14:02] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, so there’s the first piece. There’s one thing that you can do. That’s a really easy concrete thing to do. We all need the hosting. So when you go, go and look and have some trust in the Green Web Foundation’s badge, if you like. You trust that they’ve done the due diligence and that that is in some way superior, in the way that that energy is captured or what have you.

[00:14:24] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. But I have a little disclaimer. Not all green web hosting providers are in the database yet, and not all of them show the badge. But it’s really easy just to check your own website through the tool on their home page.

[00:14:39] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Thank you. Okay, what was next? What did you have next on your list?

[00:14:43] Charlotte Bax: Well, you can make sustainable choices in your architecture and your UX design. Just make it very easy for your visitors to find things on your website, so they don’t have to go here and there to search for stuff and produce lots of unnecessary page views. Because that’s all data traffic and that’s all CO2 emissions. That’s a thing you can do. Just think really good about that website architecture.

[00:15:12] Nathan Wrigley: So the idea there is that every time we produce a page, the server at some point is having to do some work. That work requires electricity. If we can cut 10 visits down to 5 visits, there’s an, obviously a 50% reduction in the amount of pages that are loaded. And again, it’s so hard in my head to encapsulate what that is doing because it just, I’m just thinking, okay, i’ve saved time. But obviously, you know, now that we’re having this chat, I’m now beginning to think more, okay, not only am I saving time, I’m actually saving electricity and therefore it’s more sustainable.

So that has a knock on consequence of course, in that nobody wants to go to 10 pages if you could go to five pages anyway. So figuring all that stuff out from the start is a good idea. Okay, lovely. Next one.

[00:15:58] Charlotte Bax: Next one is design and content creation. Yeah, what your website looks like. There’s lots of sustainable choices you can make in the assets that are shown on the front end, such as images, video, audio, the fonts that you use, the CSS styling, et cetera. We could do a whole podcast on that alone. So things I talked about previously this morning is scaling your images. Be very picky in your images.

Also sometimes I see websites that have so many pictures on it. I think people are afraid to be boring or something. But use the images that are actually valuable to your content, to tell a story instead of just putting a thousand pictures on there just because. Because images, they tell more than a thousand words, but also images are very, very heavy compared to just plain text.

[00:16:52] Nathan Wrigley: So I guess it’s, couple of things there. The first thing is use images when necessary. So that there’s not unnecessary images being loaded. But also I’m imagining that we’re probably trying to lean into newer image formats. So not only reducing the scale of the image so that it’s the correct dimensions and it’s not, you know, this giant image which is being shrunk in the browser, needlessly downloading a four megabyte image that really is like 150 kilobytes.

[00:17:19] Charlotte Bax: I saw this like on a government website that I tested and there was this, a really small icon, it was like 36 pixels wide or something. And there was an image like 6,000 by 8,000 pixels loaded for that. And I was, my heart bleeded.

[00:17:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, this should have been about 3K and it was probably more in the sort of four or five megabyte territory.

[00:17:41] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. I don’t know the exact numbers, but terrible.

[00:17:44] Nathan Wrigley: But image formats are changing as well, aren’t they? You know, in the past we were, everybody familiar with PNGs and JPEGs and things like that. And now we’ve got things like WebP and AVIF images as well. My understanding is that they are significantly reduced in their scale, with no measurable difference in the way that you can see them. They look basically identical.

[00:18:06] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. That’s really nice. WebP and AVIF, they are web friendly formats for your images and they are really lightweight. They also, they support transparent background and animation, so they are also really good alternatives to PNG and GIF, not only to JPEG.

And what I also like is that you can change the image quality when exporting to that format. Just like with JPEG, you can say, I want quality of 90, or image quality of 80% or even less. And when you’re choosing something between 80 and 90%, usually you don’t really see the difference. You can just play around with that on your computer. But it’s significantly reduces the file size.

[00:18:53] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I was playing around with something the other day and I was converting a JPEG image to a WebP image. And I went to a service, which enabled me to do that, and at 80% I genuinely couldn’t see any, I was really staring hard and I could not see a single pixel that was different.

I think, you know, maybe if it was some incredibly detailed picture of some medical procedure or something like that, maybe. But in most cases it’s not necessary. But also if it’s going to represent a tiny icon on the website, upload an image which is a tiny icon in size. Don’t upload the big one and the browser handle that.

[00:19:28] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, but also for icons, you can much better choose like a vector image, like SVG, because vector images when done right, I have seen it done wrong, which is terrible, but when done right, they are really lightweight and they are scalable without limits and without any loss of quality. And that’s really suitable for logos, for icons, for certain illustration styles. You can also use SVG really well.

[00:19:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so that’s a really good point. So for what you might call like a bitmap image, you’ve got AVIF and WebP, they seem to be the ones that are out in the front at the moment. And then for things like logos, then some kind of vector based image, like an SVG where essentially it’s data, you know, it’s bezier curves and things like that. So it can really scale up, and it will still look just as good if it’s gigantic.

So definitely listener, if you’re hearing this, go and explore those, it’s well worth it. I would say that WordPress, by default won’t allow you to upload an SVG image. You might need to get a plugin to help you out with that.

[00:20:28] Charlotte Bax: My favorite for that is Safe SVG. I just put it on there as soon as I start a new website and then just put all the SVGs on there.

[00:20:36] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s curious. It’s because it’s not truly an image. It’s kind of like a file format and so it potentially could contain some code which might be harmful to your website. But those plugins strip out all of that. That’s my understanding anyway.

[00:20:47] Charlotte Bax: Yes. So indeed, if you use plugins like that, you are at less risk of malfunctioning code, not malfunction, maleficent code.

[00:20:56] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, like malware. You know, security problems, things like that.

[00:20:59] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, but if you make your SVGs yourself, well, then you have control over that. You know there’s no malware in that, unless you put it there yourself.

[00:21:06] Nathan Wrigley: I don’t know if you have an answer to this, but obviously video is really important on the web. You know, certain types of things that people are doing online, maybe not quite so much websites but, you know, things like Instagram and TikTok and things like that, it’s really, really popular.

Do you know if there’s any similar thing happening like WebP and AVIF with movie formats? Is there anybody trying to compress those in a way that WebP and AVIF have been?

[00:21:29] Charlotte Bax: I haven’t dived into that that much, but I know there is WebM I think. But also, MPEG and or MP4. They are really good compression techniques and as lightweight as you can make it.

[00:21:45] Nathan Wrigley: I guess the same rules apply for images as for video though. You don’t needlessly put video on the website. And certainly it’s possible to deploy video in a way that it’s not as environmentally profound. You know, for example, auto play switched off.

[00:22:00] Charlotte Bax: I really hate those websites with this automatically playing background video. I must admit, when I started out as a web designer, some of my first clients, they really wanted that, so I did it. But I had an opinion on that and I explained, I didn’t know anything about the sustainability part yet by then, but I explained that it is a big file that gets loaded automatically. It really slows down your website also, so it’s a bad user experience. So I recommend that they didn’t do it, but they really wanted to.

But I really hate how some websites shove like an enormous amount of megabytes down your throat as a visitor by those autoplay background videos.

[00:22:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, and also I think there’s a move to make it so that, and I don’t know if the block editor, the video block automatically does this, I could be wrong about that. The idea of having an image placeholder instead of the video itself, because the mere putting the iframe onto the page, there’s some communication between, let’s say YouTube, if you’re embedding something from YouTube. Whereas really, you don’t need to engage YouTube until somebody’s actually clicked the play button. So having some placeholder there, click the button, click the image, and then the video begins to load. I guess there’s something there. That’s a good idea.

[00:23:18] Charlotte Bax: I have a trick for that. When you embed a YouTube video or a Vimeo, they do the preload is none thing really good, which is nice, so you don’t shove that many megabytes through someone’s throat. But what YouTube does, and Vimeo also but less, is they put a lot of tracking scripts in that embed.

So what I like to do is, so something I did for one of my latest websites for the Rotterdam Metal Band, Ann My Dice, they have this show reel of their newest songs on top of their homepage. And I put an image thumbnail there. And when you click that, it opens a modal. So the video and all those tracking scripts, they are loaded only when you click on a thumbnail to open the modal. That’s a nice little trick to work around that.

[00:24:04] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, so video and images, that’s a really easy win. There’s loads of things that you can do.

There’s lots of services out there, both on your computer, but online where you can compress the images. And obviously we’ve talked about the different formats and not necessarily loading video.

Okay, should we move on? Is there anything else on there?

[00:24:21] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, yeah. There is caching of course, which can make a huge difference. WordPress is based on a database. So in theory, every time someone visits a page on your website, the server has to calculate the webpage and then send it over to your visitor.

But if you use, for example, server side caching, you can do that once and send the generated page to all your visitors. So that saves a lot of computing energy server side. But there’s also browser caching, which means that certain assets that you can reuse, for example, your CSS style sheets, and your fonts, you can retain in a browser. So they don’t need to get loaded on every page your visitor goes to.

[00:25:06] Nathan Wrigley: There’s so many different ways of tackling this, isn’t there? Whether that’s through your web host or a collection of plugins that you might use. But yeah, caching, the idea being that it’s stored somewhere, kind of ready to go. It’s already been created. Somebody just comes along and if you like, just picks it up.

Whereas in the typical WordPress way, there’s this whole crunching of data. There’s all this PHP being rendered in the background. And the database is being called to construct the page. And really, if the page isn’t being changed from minute to minute, there’s no need for all of that. You can just have a cached version. And increasingly, you know, you don’t even have to make that cached version travel across the globe, because you can put it at the edge in different countries and so on and so forth. So there’s a whole load of interesting stuff. But caching enforce that where possible.

[00:25:54] Charlotte Bax: If you have a, I always recommend people to look at their target audience for choosing their hosting. For example, I live in the Netherlands and my target audience is mostly Dutch companies and Dutch governments. So it makes sense for me to host my website in the Netherlands. But if your target audience is all over the world, I really recommend using a CDN to distribute all your cached web pages. It makes it more sustainable and it also makes it a lot quicker.

[00:26:23] Nathan Wrigley: It’s curious that one, isn’t it? Because in many ways, using a CDN, you are creating a bigger footprint because there’s more, you know, instead of it being cached in one place, it’s now cached in multiple places. So there’s more caching happening. But the people who are absorbing that cache, using that cache, there’s a net benefit there because they have to travel less distance.

So for example, if there’s a cache data center in Sydney, and some Australian user is using that, it doesn’t have to come all the way, for example, to London and then back again. So even though you are storing multiple versions of the cache around the world, the traffic that’s going backwards and forwards from that cache often will make up for that.

[00:27:01] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, it’s really dependent on the situation and the size of your target audience because obviously if you only have like one visitor from Australia every month, it’s not worth it. So it’s also sort of, look at your own situation and make choices based on that.

I always think about, like sustainability is not something like what you can and cannot do, but I like to view it as more as inspiring people and giving them the tools to actually make conscious choices instead of just doing what the masses do and what is easy.

[00:27:37] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, there’s no destination, is there, probably? It’s more of a journey. You’re kind of trying to do little bits, and chisel away the bits that you can. Okay, so caching is a whole other topic. You can no doubt go down that rabbit hole and spend the rest of your life there.

[00:27:49] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. If you want to know more about caching, I think Ramon Fincken from Halvar knows more about that.

[00:27:56] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, thank you. Okay, so there’s another one we’ve ticked off. Anything else on your list?

[00:28:00] Charlotte Bax: Yes. There’s visitor management, because obviously the page weight is not the only factor of a website, but also you have to multiply that with all the page visits to get your total CO2 emissions over time.

So if you have a lot of visitors, and that’s not only the human visitors, but also the bots of course, then that’s a lot of CO2 emissions. And that can be up to hundreds of times more than you actually realise.

Joost de Valk had a really great talk about that a few years ago, 2022 at WordCamp Netherlands. I wasn’t there myself, but I have seen a YouTube video and I really, really recommend people checking that out because he can explain that really well.

[00:28:44] Nathan Wrigley: So this is to do with the amount of traffic that you are getting.

[00:28:47] Charlotte Bax: Yes, yes. The amount of traffic. So page weight times traffic is CO2 emissions basically.

[00:28:53] Nathan Wrigley: Okay, interesting.

[00:28:54] Charlotte Bax: Yes.

[00:28:54] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. Next one.

[00:28:56] Charlotte Bax: That’s the last one in my list. And that is sort of the cherry on top. And that is to make your website grid aware. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Fershad Irani. No. He is one of the pioneers in website sustainability. He does a lot of projects for the Green Web Foundation. And currently he is working on grid aware websites toolkits to make your website responsive to the energy mix on the local energy grid from your visitor. And he does that with Cloudflare CDN workers. I hope I explained that right because that’s an area that I’m less familiar with.

But what it does, for example, if your website visitor is in an area where the energy grid is mostly running on fossil fuel energy, then it shows a more minimal experience of your website to the visitor. And when they are in an area where the grid is a big percentage renewable energy, then it shows a more rich experience of your website.

[00:30:01] Nathan Wrigley: Gosh, that’s fascinating. So it’s like progressive enhancement, but for sustainability.

[00:30:07] Charlotte Bax: Yes.

[00:30:07] Nathan Wrigley: So I might see an entirely different page with, let’s say, I don’t know, a greater number of images on it or something like that, given the awareness that the website has of where I’m viewing it, or where it is being hosted? I wasn’t sure about that bit. Is it more about the visitor or more about the location of the hosting of that?

[00:30:26] Charlotte Bax: It’s about the visitor in this case, yeah. And I think he does that in a really, really smart way. There’s also sort of a version of the toolkit that does it browser based. I don’t know enough about that to explain that right I think.

[00:30:39] Nathan Wrigley: Genuinely, that’s fascinating. That really feels like he’s pushing the boundaries. What I’ll do is I’ll try to find a link to something.

[00:30:46] Charlotte Bax: There is a page on the website of the Green Web Foundation, and if you contact Fershad through LinkedIn or Mastodon, or I’m happy to link you with him. He is currently working on it and he is looking for people and websites to experiment with it. I think it’s a really nice experiment to see how much effect this can have. I’m really curious.

[00:31:07] Nathan Wrigley: It kind feels like a technology which is going to be very difficult to pull off, but very profound if it is pulled off. You can imagine high traffic websites, and I’m thinking of news organisations, for example, the BBC or something like that, that just have millions of views every few minutes, I would’ve thought, and could really benefit from something like that. You know, showing a different website. I’d never heard of that. That’s fascinating.

[00:31:29] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, it’s a really new project. He’s still developing the toolkit right now. I think it’s a really amazing project and that could be really impactful for, yeah, those really high traffic websites. I have seen, earlier this week I had a video call with Fershad, and he showed me a demo version on, oh, I don’t know the name, I can’t recall it, but it was like an online magazine.

There was this menu, there was just this dropdown in the menu bar with four items, live low, medium, and high. So you could choose the settings yourself, or you just could go with the live thing, based on your own energy grid where you were localised.

[00:32:08] Nathan Wrigley: So like a demo, and you can pick how you would like to see it in four different versions. Okay.

[00:32:12] Charlotte Bax: Yeah, yeah. The live version is like how it is shown based on your energy grid. But as a visitor, you can also choose your own way if you want to see the more rich version or the more minimised version. And the information on the website, it just stays the same of course, but it shows less images and that kind of stuff. But if you view it in the, like the minimalist version, you can still opt to see images if you want to by just clicking on it. It’s a really smart way he does that.

[00:32:43] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, it’s fascinating. So in my email client, for example, I have it set up, the default is do not show me images, and I just click a button, display images, and they all come in. I can’t pick which images, they all just come. But there’s a decision there, you know, it is like I’ve decided not to see all the images off the bat. Click a button and in they come.

That is really interesting. So I presume the text would stay the same, because that’s the core of what the website is probably offering, text. But, you know, do you want a heavy experience in terms of data? Well, there it is. There’s all the images and the videos. Yeah, okay, I will follow that up. That sounds fascinating.

So we’re at we WordCamp EU. This is all about WordPress. How do you feel WordPress, by default, so ignoring any plugins, if I just chuck a default version of WordPress, a vanilla version of WordPress out there, how does it do in terms of sustainability compared to other things in the environment?

[00:33:33] Charlotte Bax: Oh, that’s really funny because I haven’t really done any research into that. What I have done is I made, it’s some time ago, but I checked some of the WordPress vanilla themes against some of my favorite themes, just making a staging website with only lorem ipsum paragraph, and just the vanilla theme, and then checking how much page weight it is, and how much CO2 emissions on first load. But that’s ages ago. And I, maybe you just sort of started a new project in my head.

[00:34:05] Nathan Wrigley: Ah, nice.

[00:34:07] Charlotte Bax: Measure the CO2 emissions of WordPress themes and vanilla WordPress. I think that’s a good idea.

[00:34:12] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, because it feels to me, especially if you’re using a WordPress default theme, they do seem to be quite light, you know, there’s a lot of text and very, I mean, some of the themes that we’ve had in the past, I can’t remember, I’m just trying to conjure it up, it might have been 2021 or something like that. It was basically all text. And I just wondered if WordPress itself could be proud of its sustainability over time, or whether it was something that, you know, compared to other CMSs but, you know, if you don’t have that data, that’s okay.

[00:34:40] Charlotte Bax: I don’t have the data, but I do think that maybe WordPress could be more of a front runner in terms of sustainability. For example, I learned that Drupal already has like a sustainability policy and they’re doing certain things on that. But unfortunately, our own sustainability team got canceled.

But yesterday, during Contributor Day, there were like 10 people or something, they really wanted to do a sustainability table, so we just impromptu did that. The table cards, they were there. So we just did it and we formed a new team. Still unofficial. I have no idea how it happened, but apparently I’m a team rep now. There are some of the old sustainability team members that also want to continue their work. So we sort of started an impromptu petition to get the sustainability team their official status back, so it can become a core value of WordPress.

And I think that it would really help WordPress to be a front runner, especially in Europe where sustainability is, as far as I know, sustainability is a bigger thing in Europe than in America or Asia. That’s how I feel it. And I think if we don’t jump on that sustainability bandwagon, we could really lose market share.

[00:35:58] Nathan Wrigley: Yeah, I think you’re right. I’m curious about the sustainability team. So you are talking about Contrib Day yesterday?

[00:36:03] Charlotte Bax: Yes.

[00:36:05] Nathan Wrigley: An impromptu sustainability team sort of set itself up and just carried on as if nothing had happened. So that’s interesting.

[00:36:11] Charlotte Bax: Yes. Not really as if nothing had happened. Most of the time we spent on like strategising how to get this back on the road again, and how to continue because the previous team, they did really great work and I just latched on a few weeks before they got closed down and I think it’s really sad.

[00:36:29] Nathan Wrigley: Well, you’ve given us loads of really interesting tips. Hopefully the listeners to this have gathered some useful information. Realised that it’s a profoundly important and moral topic to be involved in.

Should anybody wish to contact you and get into a conversation about how they could become involved, or just some tips or what have you, where do we find you, Charlotte?

[00:36:48] Charlotte Bax: You can find me on LinkedIn. You can find Digihobbit on LinkedIn, and you can also find Digihobbit on Mastodon. I’m not really on like the regular social media channels, but that’s a whole different topic to discuss. I also have a personal LinkedIn profile, but if you want to link with me personally, just add a message to it so I sort of know the context.

[00:37:08] Nathan Wrigley: Okay. So dear listener, I will put everything that we’ve talked about today, all of the Green Web Foundation’s, and other varied links into the show notes. Head to wptavern.com and search for the episode with Charlotte Bax.

So Charlotte Bax, thank you very much for chatting to me today. I really appreciate it.

[00:37:22] Charlotte Bax: Thank you very much, Nathan, for having me.

[00:37:24] Nathan Wrigley: You’re most welcome.

On the podcast today we have Charlotte Bax.

Charlotte is a sustainable web designer with a background in both environmentally conscious living and technology. Beginning her journey as a sustainable lifestyle blogger, she soon merged her passion for sustainability with her skills in web design, rebranding herself as Digihobbit. For several years now, Charlotte has been focused on building websites that prioritise low carbon footprints, and she is also the founder of the climate tech startup ENNOR Toolbox for Online Sustainability, which helps measure the CO2 emissions of websites and web applications.

When we made this recording, Charlotte had just finished presenting at WordCamp Europe on the topic of how to make your website more sustainable, and her presentation is the topic of the podcast today.

We talk about digital environmental impact, the hidden pollution our websites create through their energy use and infrastructure. Charlotte explains some striking facts about the carbon footprint of ICT, noting that if the internet were a country, it would be the seventh largest polluter globally.

She shares a wide array of practical steps for web professionals to reduce the environmental impact of their sites. You’ll hear about the benefits of green web hosting, using modern image formats like WebP and AVIF, optimising architecture and UX to minimise unnecessary page loads, the crucial role of caching, as well as some new innovations like grid-aware websites which adapt themselves based on the renewable energy mix available to users in real time.

The conversation also touches on Charlotte’s involvement in WordPress sustainability initiatives, the importance of multiplying small improvements across high-traffic sites, and the moral imperative web creators have to help shape a greener internet.

If you’ve ever wondered how digital choices impact the planet, and what steps you can take today to help, this episode is for you.

Useful links

Charlotte’s Digihobbit website

Charlotte on LinkedIn

Charlotte on Mastodon

Website Carbon calculator by Whole Grain Digital

ENNOR Toolbox for Online Sustainability

Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood

Green Web Foundation

Safe SVG plugin

Charlotte’s website for the band Ann My Dice

Ramon Fincken on LinkedIn

Improve the environment. Start with your website! Joost de Valk’s talk at WordCamp Nederland 2022

Fershad Irani’s website