Writing - Featured

A collection of my most popular blog posts about website sustainability and performance.

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Why are you estimating digital carbon emissions?

In this post, I want to look at the two different carbon accounting models used for estimation, and in what scenario you might use one over the other.

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Thinking about a way to estimate website energy use

In this post, I want to continue building out an incremental model, but rather than focusing on emissions calculations I want to create a model to estimate energy use.

Logo of COP28 with a circle on the left featuring illustrations of green energy systems, animals and a man. On the right the text COP28 UAE.

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COP28 UAE: A Low Carbon Website Review

It's almost COP time, which means another website review! This year I'm focusing on the controversial Low Carbon Version of the COP28 website, and looking at how it has been implemented.

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Making this website carbon aware

Building carbon awareness into products is an important strategy to in the challenge to develop a more sustainable future. In this post, I cover how I used Cloudflare Workers and real-time data to make this website carbon aware.

Yellow analogue weight scale display with the needle position just before 500 kg.

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Improving the accuracy of website carbon emissions estimates

Existing models for website carbon emissions are good for reaching a ballpark figure of website CO2 emissions. This post goes into some ways to generate more specific, accurate emissions estimates.

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Checking where website requests come from with ReqCheck

ReqCheck is a tool I’ve built to help folks find out where all the different requests made by a web page are served from. I’m hoping it can be a tool for both web sustainability and web performance folks to use when auditing websites.

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CO2.js: An Open Library for Digital Carbon Reporting

Uploading and downloading the bits and bytes that make up the internet uses a lot of electricity. Breaking the internet down to a systems level, data transfer over networks accounts for an estimated 14% of the web’s total electricity consumption.

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A carbon aware internet

Knowing the carbon intensity of the electricity grids in which code runs can allow developers to make informed decisions about where/when to run their code.

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Website performance and the planet

Solid website performance can have a lot of a positive effects from increasing revenue, to reducing stress of users. But did you know that making your site faster can also be good for the planet?

Female protestor holding up cardboard sign with the words 'Less is more. It's eco-logical' painted on it.

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“Use less. Use green. Buy green.”

By using less power, using green power, and buying from green suppliers businesses and individuals alike can reduce their carbon footprint. How would we go about applying this same thinking to website performance and sustainability?

COP26 banner with purple globe. Glasgow COP26, in partnership with Italy.

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COP26.org: A quick sustainability check

With COP26 about to take place in Glasgow, let's take a quick look at how the COP26 homepage holds up in terms digital sustainability. What's its carbon footprint, and can it be improved?

Wind turbines standing in a grass field in Spain.

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Reducing website carbon emissions

As our thirst for data, connectivity, and content grows, so does the portion of global carbon emissions attributed to the internet. In this post, we'll take a look at the steps frontend developers can take to make sites more efficient and better for the planet.

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Frontend tips to speed up your WordPress website

WordPress powers over 40% of the internet. It's a powerful platform that makes content creation possible for more people. In this post we'll cover some simple performance optimisation tips you can use to make your WordPress website faster!

Person holding black Android smartphone with Google search page on screen.

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Core Web Vitals and Google Search

Core Web Vitals are a set of page experience metrics that will be making up part of Google's the search ranking mix from June, 2021. So, what exactly are they?