The Web’s dirty secret

The Internet uses a lot of electricity. For most of the world, producing electricity means the burning of fossil fuels, this in turn means that the Internet’s carbon footprint may have already eclipsed global air travel.

The Mozilla Internet Health Report 2018 states that, especially as the Internet expands into new territory, “sustainability should be a bigger priority”. But as it stands, websites are growing ever more obese, which means that the energy demand of the web is growing exponentially.

There is a nascent but notable shift within the web industry towards making it more sustainable.

Delivering WordPress in 7KB 6KB*



This website aims to act as a guide to making WordPress websites more sustainable, and to serve as a practical example of how we can tune our websites and reduce their carbon footprint. The homepage of this website is delivered to your browser with just 6KB of data transfer. This is achieved by its theme, plugins and configuration. As of 2016, the average website data transfer was 2.3MB, making it 393 times bigger than this website!

I will be adding more resources here, but in the meantime check out my blog post on how this project came to be. You can also check out Susty on GitHub.

*sustywp.com is now delivered in about 6.3KB thanks to a manual rewrite of the SVG