THIS IS A
LOW CARBON
WEBSITE.
The carbon footprint of our devices and the internet, as an ecosystem behind them, account for over 3.5% of the global carbon output. But Internet is not an autonomous being with its own will - it’s merely the sum of all the decisions made by software developers, web designers, marketing departments, publishers and internet users.
To be a sustainable business, we need to make sure our website has the smallest possible carbon footprint, while maintaining easy access to our content for our visitors.
WHAT WE DO
GREEN HOSTING
The biggest energy vampire of a website is the server it is hosted on - so however we are reducing our energy needs, we still need to make sure that energy comes from responsible sources. We are hosting our website with a hosting provider running on certified renewable energy source.
DITHERED IMAGES
The biggest data load on websites is created by the transmission of images. This is getting worse every year: as our devices get better screens with greater resolution, websites need to get higher resolution images for an acceptable look. We eliminated a large portion of the images on our website, and the ones we kept, we are also compressing with a really oldschool image compression technique called dithering. By dithering, we can make images less resource-intensive to a ridiculous degree, even when they are displayed quite large. The number of colours in an image, combined with its file format and resolution, contributes to the size of an image. Thus, instead of using full-colour high-resolution images, we chose to convert all images to monochrome, with only black and transparent color - all else is created in CSS. We are also compressing images with a lossy webp codec, making them another 20-30% smaller, and including them inline in base64, to reduce the number of requests even further.
DEFAULT TYPEFACE
All resources loaded, including typefaces, are an additional request to the server, requiring storage space and energy use. Therefore, our website does not load a custom typeface and removes the font-family declaration, meaning that visitors will see the default typefaces of their browser, a mono, sans-serif and a serif font.
NO LOGO
Obviously. At least not in the usual sense. Our logo on the website is generated from the default fonts on your computer, so it may look a bit different for different people.
NO TRACKING
Web analysis software such as Google Analytics, Hotjar, Facebook Pixel records what happens on a website — which pages are most viewed, where visitors come from, and so on. These services would make our lives easier by providing insight to analyse our CRM operations, advertising, or our website in general. However, exchanging these data generates extra data traffic and thus energy use. These tracking codes also generate additional load on the client computer (i.e., your browser), further adding to the carbon footprint of our website. Therefore, we decided to run our website without any external tracking, and without setting any cookies (except a session cookie needed for the contact form) in your browser, and only using our (very anonymous) server logs for analytics. This isn’t just great for the environment, but also gives you additional privacy, and removes the need for those annoying cookie warnings.
NO CMS
Most of today’s websites use extensive server side programming and database operations that generate the website on the fly - most often through a CMS. This means that every time someone visits a web page, it is generated on demand. Sure, this kind of operation makes website management much easier, but in our case, the benefits don’t outweigh the environmental costs. So our website is run with a majority of basic HTML and CSS code, with some JS for interactivity on the frontend, and a couple of lines of PHP in the backend for things like form submission. Besides reducing the carbon footprint, this makes our website much more secure.
MINIMAL JS
All those animations you see in your browser every day are generated by JS - and very often through loading a couple of huge JS libraries in your browser. This kind of animation is also rarely optimized properly, meaning it uses an extreme amount of resources on your side. To fight this, we minimised the use of any JS on our website, and the ones we have are created with vanilla JS and HTML/CSS.
LIGHT AND DARK
It’s quite a tricky question whether dark themed websites actually consume less energy or not. With the introduction of modern screen technologies where black pixels actually mean a LED being turned off (like AMOLED), there seems to be a considerable advantage with dark modes. On the other hand, if you are in a dark environment, it is much more comfortable reading a white text over a black background, requiring less brightness from our devices, therefore reducing energy consumption; while if you are in a light environment, the opposite is much better. So rather than going full dark, we decided to go with a different approach, and have 4 different color schemes changing through the day, depending on the usual color temperature of natural light at different times of day - always presenting the site with the color scheme with the highest contrast potential - so you should not need a very high brightness. Of course in the evening it will switch to dark mode.