This is an eco-friendly website

A heavy website is a polluting website. In 2021 the average size of a website is between 7 and 8 Mb. This website has an average page size of 840kb, so ten times lighter than a modern web page. This is because it was designed and developed to be as eco-friendly as possible, so that it would not only run fast, but also have a small carbon footprint.

Images & Videos

In a website, images and videos, are the most costly features in terms of bandwidth. They take up more than 70% of the size of an average web page. This means the best way to reduce the weight of the web page is to include as few images and videos as possible. However, this website is an artist's portfolio. Images of a decent quality are required to display the artworks the way they are meant to be seen. Thus, while performing image compression, a trade-off had to be found between quality and performance.

Images and videos [...] take up more than 70% of the size of an average web page.

Movement also plays a big role in the art of Carine Figueras, so it was important for the website to feature animated content. As video costs a lot of bandwidth, it was decided that only one animated hero image would be featured for each installation. These animated images were then compressed as much as possible.

A simple website

This is a simple website, that fulfills its purpose and nothing more.

• It's static, which means it uses basic components every web browser can read: HTML, CSS and Javascript.
• It has only the features we need : why add a social media feed if it's not essential to what the website conveys? It just overwhelms readers.
• It doesn't use script libraries, that can slow down most modern pages by the sheer size of their code (some of it being never used).
• There are no ads and no tracking. We show the content the users want to see.

Hosting

A big part of the energy consumption of the Internet is the servers on which the websites are hosted.

• This is why this website is hosted by OVH, a company located in France, which has an electricity mix with a very low carbon footprint.
• OVH also took big steps to ensure their datacenters are as efficient as possible.

Selfish reasons to switch to a small website

A small website is not only nicer for the planet, but also for you:

• It's very fast : less scripts and images in a page tend to do that. Research shows that the faster a page loads, the more users stay and engage with its content.
• Speed also plays a big role in successful SEO, since Google's indexing robots rank fast websites higher!
• It has international and rural compatibility : not everyone has a lightning fast bandwidth. By having a website that loads on slow connections, you improve its ability to be read by everyone.
• It's simple, so it takes less time to be made. Ergo, it costs less in terms of human hours.

It's about sending a message

Switching to eco-friendly websites will not heal the planet. In terms of size, the carbon footprint of browsing a website is dwarfed by those of streaming and crypto. So what is the point of an eco-friendly website? What do they do? What they do is show that an other way is possible: an Internet made of simple and fast websites, free from bloat, easy on the eyes and on our carbon footprint. They remind us that the Internet is a very real, physical construct of our world, and not the weightless "cloud" we see it as. They show that an energetic transition to a more frugal society encompasses every aspect of society, and high-tech is not immune to this change.

If you are interested in a light, eco-friendly website, please contact Hugo Gervasoni via mail: hgervasoni@protonmail.com

Footnotes

1. That's 2 times the average size of a website in 2012, see this online tool to compare different years ↩
2. You can tell with this performance test on one of the heaviest pages: here ↩
3. You can see in this graph that images are the main source of page bloat ↩
4. You can find here a comparison of CO2 efficiency and consumption between France and other countries ↩
5. OVH explains in detail what they added to their datacenters to increase the efficiency of their datacenters in here ↩
6. Here's a Google article about speed and how it influences user satisfaction ↩
7. For the impact of streaming, see this . As for the impact of crypto, you can read more in this wikipedia article ↩