 Thank you. Thank you very much. And indeed, thanks for coming. So many of you for a talk that you might not want to hear. But I think you really should. So that's why I'm here. Let's start. This was actually the thing that I was going to show, and everyone should be shocked. But since it's around the fifth talk about sustainability, now you know that the Internet has a huge carbon footprint. It's kind of confrontational, I think, since we all work on the Internet, use the Internet and build a big part of it as WordPress or other applications. So I think it's interesting to see what we can do about it and how we can contribute to decrease this footprint of the Internet. I noted there below, which is not very much visible now, that if the Internet was a country it would be the sixth largest polluter in the world. One more yellow slide. Yellow slides are the warning slides. You'll be the shocking. And after we go to better ones, positive ones. So this is a comment on the IPCC's report from this year earlier in April. It's the last report they published. So it says it's now or never if you want to limit global warming to one and a half degrees. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible. So I think we're in all sectors. And why did I say it's last report? Because it takes a while to, I'm not sure if you're familiar with those reports, but they are different parts. And in these parts, they actually tell us what we should do or what we need to do right now to keep the temperature rise below one and a half degrees. And so it takes a while to make a report like this. The next one will probably be around within seven years or something. So that may be a bit late for immediate action. So more neutral or positive slides now. Last code for now, I promise. This one is from Gary Cook from Greenpeace. I think a while ago it says that the internet is the single biggest thing we're going to build as species. And if we build it the right way, with the right source of energy, it could really help power our transition to renewables. If we build it the wrong way, it could actually exacerbate the problem. So actually, I think we have a choice. What's also special about the internet, I think, and Jerome too yesterday mentioned this in another sustainability talk, that actually the internet was built in an era where we were conscious about climate change. Maybe not that much or that good as now. But we were, let's be honest. And still, it uses a lot of energy. We do things with it we maybe shouldn't do. So I think there is some work to do. Let's take a look. So a word about me. I'm a web designer at Little Big Things. Also by engineer and a father. And those three things make that I'm conscious care about the environment and try to do my part. I also try to contribute to WordPress and love to ride bikes and play music as well. For me, it was also not that long ago that I came into, let's say, contact with sustainability and the internet, so digital sustainability. It started for me with a tiny website. A contest actually. A couple of years ago. It was a contest from a list apart. It was called Tanki Apart. And the goal was to build a working website that can load in 10 kilobytes. I looked it up and actually at that moment, I'm not sure now, but an empty word file is 11 kilobytes. So 10 kilobytes is rather small. But there were a lot of entries. I did my entry. There is a link to the original website. I wanted to show you both, but maybe I tell first because it's kind of tricky to get there. So I made the website. It was in the end. I worked a lot on it. It was a lot of work. Loaded in seven kilobytes. And that was it actually. I didn't win or I learned a lot and I left it like that until I was looking at a conference. Attempting a conference online. I was kind of busy with other things. You know how it goes. If you're online until I heard the speaker mention something familiar for me, and apparently he took that website as an example for a tiny website. And so after a while, I felt maybe I should do something more about this with that. And maybe I could blog about it. So I built a WordPress blog from it because that was a static website, just an HTML bit of PHP. Yeah, and then global warning blog was created, which is now kind of quiet. But yeah, there is some information on it about web sustainability. And it's a manageable blog with WordPress. And page size is about 30 kilobytes if you, for the home page around that. So I'm going to try to show you, but I have to go come out of the presentation to the next screen. So this was the original version. So you have, yeah, it's not like, I hope it's not at the first side that you see is just seven kilobytes, maybe 10 now or something. And then, yes, here is the blog version, the WordPress version, which is built with blogs. It's not that up to date now. Maybe I updated one once for a full site editing or something. But I hope the internet works well. So you see, it's kind of, okay, to work with it. Okay. And the other way around to get to do. Ah, if I find my mouse, yes. Oh, by the way, it's also on a shared hosting on a multi-site. So it's not that it's on quite a quick hosting, but as you see, it helps to have 30 kilobytes only to load. So I'm going to talk about a bit broader about a sustainable web and what it could be, what it can be, what it must be actually. And my talk is built around the sustainable web manifesto. You can see it's down there. And I learned a lot about sustainability as well from a sustainable web design book from Tom Greenwood. So they have this definition of a sustainable web. A sustainable web should be clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient. So it's just a bit broader than the number of kilobytes, but I think it's very useful to keep this in mind when we build websites and applications. So let's start with clean. Is the web actually clean? And if not, why is it not clean? First and foremost, it needs electricity. You've heard about this conference, at least that it comes from, that it's needed for servers, networks, and devices. And it can come from fossil fuels, nuclear or renewable sources. Unfortunately enough, it's still a lot from fossil fuels these days. So that means that there is a carbon footprint to it. For electricity use, globally, it's about 3% to 5%, but it would go up a lot in the coming years. And as you all know, electricity is not getting cheaper now. So it's interesting to make things more clean, efficient, so to reduce energy use. Because of course, if you use the energy for this, you cannot use it for that. And some things can be more essential than watching Netflix movie or loading websites. I'm not going to be very strict about numbers, because numbers are sometimes different. So we're going to take a look at how we can view websites, compare websites. That's a bit better. A bit later. As for carbon emissions, it's up to 4% of global emissions. Just like we said, it is kind of huge. Because, yeah, it's just the internet. Okay, it's large, but still. And it's rising significantly. So, yeah. What can you do to be cleaner? Of course, use renewable energy. Clean energy to host your websites. It seems kind of, yeah, the easiest, maybe the easiest thing you can do, move your website to a host that uses renewable energy. And you can find a host by the greenwebfoundation.org or check your current host, whether it's using clean energy, renewable energy or not. The next thing that a sustainable app should do, yeah, be is efficient. And then we can ask ourselves the question whether the web is efficient or not. You can see a graph from the HTTP archive from the last six years or something. And you see the desktop and the mobile websites, web page sizes, actually the medium web page sizes. These are the total of kilobytes transferred per page view. And you see that, I didn't put the numbers, but it's actually nice to see that it's not nice to see, but it's still rising. And the medium web page is above two megabytes right now. Maybe also notice the differences between the lighter colors. You see that the average is probably a lot more, about three maybe even three megabytes. So that's a lot, I think. Here are a couple of numbers to, yeah, just one of the striking numbers was for me, yeah, 71 requests, okay, yeah, maybe. But 500 kilobytes of JavaScript transferred as a transfer size. So mostly it should be GZipped. So you can imagine, that's a lot. And a lot of computing work as well for the computer, because JavaScript is the, yeah, let's see, the heaviest to interpret, let's see. Also first content will paint three and a half, three, more than three and a half seconds on mobile to a desktop. And time to interact is about 16 seconds, which seems rather a lot. So I'm not sure if the web is efficient now. Certainly it could be more efficient. But if you like math, we can do a bit of math to come from the average web page size to the carbon footprint of the average web page size. The first number, the 1.8 watts that you see is, yeah, it's hard to say whether it's correct number. It differs a bit in literature, how much energy you need, how much electricity you need to transfer megabytes. But if we take that number, which is taken in the website carbon calculator as well, if I'm not mistaken, which we'll see later, then if, yeah, okay, maybe I'm going to explain the second number, the 0.48 comes from the electricity map. And there is a website, which I wanted to show, but I think it takes like a minute to get there now. So it's just, it's a map of the whole world for countries for which they have data for. And it shows how intense, how much carbon is emitted for a certain amount of energy. So how the higher the number, the worse the energy is, because that means it comes from fossil fuels. So I looked it up for the Netherlands. It was about 480 grams. It changes different moments of the day, different periods. But so that's that number that I used to come from the energy used per megabyte to the carbon equivalent per megabyte. So it's about 0.68. And then if we take the average website or the medium web page size, then we come around two grams of CO2 for an average page load in the Netherlands. So that seems maybe not that much. But if you think about it, there are billions of users, billions of websites loaded a day. So you can imagine you come to a large, large number. So any reduction, that's also important to see that any small reduction can have a huge impact. So be more efficient. We'll get us there maybe, get a bit further. There is the address of the website carbon calculator. If you want, you can scan it and you can test your web page. The average website seems to be around a half gram per page view. Yeah, if someone tests it, you can shout it out. If you're below that, it will be kind of cool, I think. I tested the, not to become the WordPress organizers, but I tested the website of the WordCamp. It's around, it's below average, but it seems that it's on standard, so not renewable energy. The other one is the blog that I just showed you, which is much lower, of course. Besides this, testing your own website, if you want to go further, you have tools, this JavaScript library, CO2JS, from the Marine Web Foundation. You can use it to measure the impact of your application. You can use it internally just to have your, to check on your carbon budget if you have one, if you set one, which might be interesting. Or if you can use it on the front end to inform users for activities that they do, what kind of impact that activity has. It can be interesting to spread awareness about the fact that the internet has a footprint and all activities on it have a footprint. For, let's say, smaller websites, there are a lot of things you can do, which probably all of you heard, if you've seen one of those presentations before. I'm not going to go into detail, but of course, reducing image sizes makes a whole lot, because images, especially uploaded by users, are sometimes very large. Using modern formats helps a lot, and optimizing resolution is just such a size in compression. It's a big step. It's probably the largest step you can do. I use a plugin that automates this when uploading an image. It's going to optimize the uploaded image and also all the thumbnails and all the other formats that WordPress creates. Of course, using less Java scripts helps. And then I think about all tracking scripts, all scripts that are loaded for embedded videos. There are ways to not actually load them, but load them on request when the user clicks. Font files can be made smaller by choosing the right format, modern format, or substituting it for the language that you need, only you need. Of course, caching or even keeping the site static or building it as a progressive web app can help a lot. I have two examples of what you also can do, for example, what Google does. They use the electricity map to plan their heavy operations, apparently. With the electricity map, they make predictions also about when more renewable energy is available. So Google plans their heavy operations, I suppose migrations and stuff, to do it when electricity is cleaner. Another cool example is Branch Magazine, which is a magazine from Climate Action Tech. Climate Action Tech is also, if you're interested in web sustainability, join them on Slack, a very cool group of tech people who are involved in climate change or doing something about it. But on the Branch Magazine, they use the grid intensity, which is something else, but it gives you information about how clean the energy is that you run on, based on the user location and stuff. And depending on that, you load a different version of the website. Mostly if the energy is clean, you load everything. If the energy is less clean, you load some kind of pixelated version of the image, which is a lot smaller, and you have also some viewable differences to see where you are. And if the energy is very high-carbon intensive, then you don't load the image at all. You can click to load it if you want. But it's kind of cool to see such solutions or clever ways to optimize performance. So if you have one, share it with us. Optimize performance, please. Oh yeah, Kudo for the performance team, that does a lot for the whole WordPress community. Yeah, thanks for the mouth, to just make WordPress much-performance. And I think a last quote, if you're thinking about features, maybe just dropping it, that's the most sustainable thing you can do. So yeah, be a minimal and think about things like page budgets that you don't want to limit yourself, let's say. Limiting yourself helps to make choices. So now we come to open. So this term says actually the products and the services we provide will be accessible, allow for the open exchange of information and allow users to control their data. I think that accessibility is very important, has to be mentioned here, of course. Since we do more and more on the web, people get left behind if they have problems to do things that we do on the web. Of course, open source, I think that's a part of it too. I wouldn't be able to do the things I love to do now if WordPress wasn't there, it wasn't open source, probably the same thing for a lot of you. So things that are built openly are mostly more robust and are widely usable. So I think that's a good thing for a sustainable web. Of course we can learn from each other if we can see each other's code. And another thing to openness is probably applications that can communicate with each other. I know a lot of governmental services have to provide their data as open data so people can do things with it which can be interesting for users. On the flip side maybe, user data has to be also open for the users to view and control and to be deleted. The GDPR, we all know that this is now, this must be possible now so think about it if you build something where your users on your website. WordPress allows us quite easily to add data to those things which then are deleted automatically when the user requests it. Honest, we must not mislead or exploit users. I think that's an important one too. Probably you all agree that if you see those cookie banners and then think, oh yeah, I have the time, I'm going to click to just apply my selection. And then you click it open and you see okay, the selection is quite good. Click again and by accident you clicked the wrong button and you allowed everything because the other button was so, yeah. So I hate that, I hate that. So I think I take the time and I'm still, so don't do that please. Sneaky tricks like buttons that jump around so I don't think that that gives trust users to the user on the long term so he's probably just won't just lose your users anyway. A couple of years ago I switched also from Google Analytics which we kind of automatically put on all websites to more user-friendly and maybe private, not maybe certainly private friendly analytics providers plausible is probably most known for now, most known example of it. It's paid but it's kind of okay if you have smaller websites. Cabin is a new one, actually is an analytics provider that also gives you information about your carbon emission of all pages of your website. And then you have the open source one, Matomo and I think Fatem is also open source. By the way, if plausible is also open source but they have a paid method which is okay but you can use it when you have to host it yourself. What you can do as an agency or if you have the freedom to do that you can support honest and good businesses, make websites for those instead of others and of course be an honest business yourself as well. And I think you have to look at the long term always because short term wins are sometimes losses in the long term. So be kind and ethical please. Regenerative, why do we have to be regenerative and what does that mean? Again a yellow slide, it was a long time ago now. So we come far with polluting a lot of CO2 in the air. So if you look at this graph you see that we come from around 320 or something and 350 should be. So this is the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere which is kind of low but it makes a lot of difference if it goes higher. So 350 is kind of like the limit to have a comfortable life as a human and also for the environment. And we are already at 420. The sad news is that if we stop now with emitting this will still have consequences for years to come and that's the reason that we have to be regenerative. We have to try to get CO2 out of the atmosphere. We have these cool systems called trees. If you plant them that helps a lot. Of course it won't solve everything if we don't stop polluting but it's a good thing to do. What can you do as a web designer of how can you help there? You can empower people to take meaningful actions if you give them the information or give them the information about what they're doing as these consequences. Then they can act upon it and maybe they can do things to restore or to compensate for their actions. You can also discourage bed habits, encourage good ones through your application. You can build applications or you can refer to applications. Let's say you can be the example. And planting trees. I think that's also not a bad idea if you sell products for example. On certain actions you can automatically plant trees with a couple of tools that you can find online with APIs that are open. If you have other ideas, always nice to hear them. But I think we can play a part in regeneration as well. The last one, resilience. The products and the services you provide will function in the times and places when people need them the most. I think if you think about disasters or what we're going to meet more and more probably in the future, it's important that websites keep functioning and people need them. Maybe you have to think about it, do not make them dynamic but make them static to work well. Actually the first time I read about resiliency concerning the web. It was in a book from Jeremy Keith and he explains it's kind of cool that the web was able to grow this way because of the languages we use, HTML and CSS. They are kind of resilient. If you have new versions, new properties in CSS, the browsers won't stop displaying the website. They just neglect the code that they don't know. So you can that way introduce new stuff. It doesn't mean they will work in older browsers but they won't be broken. It's kind of a cool feature of the web. It makes it possible to progress. Side notes, JavaScript is not one of those languages. So if you do things in JavaScript that the browser doesn't know, it will break and your website won't be functioning. So maybe try to use less JavaScript especially for websites that are important in certain situations. Of course, keep things secure and make things robust. And we're almost there. So we have these things again, clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative and resilient. Try to be that if you're building a website. Become a sustainability expert and make your contributions front. And one of the ways you can do that, just before I close, please feel free to join the sustainability channel that exists since WordCamp Europe at Slack. Hopefully a lot of interesting things are coming up. But feel free to leave your message or contribution there. Thank you very much. I was just about like, you mentioned yesterday, sustainability channel. Yes, thank you. Why don't you mention that when you saved for the last year? Do you have any questions? Hi, I'm Lisbeth. Thank you for your great talk. Very important. Can you tell us a little bit about how you can create the tiniest WordPress website? What do you use? Practical tips? Are there things you don't use? Yeah, a lot of things don't use a lot of things. That's probably the best advice I can give. For that website, it was a couple of years ago. So I think I used the underscores, which most of you may know. Back then it was a thing. Underscores is a starter team. And then there is a link to two blog posts, where I explain how I did it. Probably that's more in detail than I can do it now. Certainly, besides not using too much, don't use a team that is meant for everything. And just as I said, for resiliency, leave out the JavaScript because that won't work. Yes, not no special. It takes some more work than just throw in everything. Take the time if you have that. You can share those two links with our official hashtag. I will. Okay. What I'm also concerned about, and I don't know how that affects the use of carbon, is that we work online. We have the cloud. And everything is in the cloud. Even some applications you want to use, you are using locally, are now only available in the cloud. Yes, and the cloud is kind of a cool name for something that is on the earth. We're here with us somewhere, maybe far, where it's colder, but still. Yeah, that's true. You can do things that reduce it, but it seems the way to go now. If you were referring to online meetings and stuff like that. Yeah, of course. What I do mostly to reduce my, because that has obviously a large footprint, if you have a meeting, introduce yourself with cameras, then you can shut it down. What I do if they want me to keep all my video, of course, put pants on, but also just shut down the incoming videos. After a while, some jokes you can miss like that, but still, it's kind of okay for a meeting. Yeah, of course, if the cloud is green, it's less of an impact, but still, not because they cry. It's the same for if you have your west side with a green host, that makes only about 10 to 13 percent of your footprint, because yeah, all the data has to travel via ways you don't have any control about. I'm not sure though. Yeah, of course, using renewable energy is the way to go, but still, we have a lot of data and it's just getting more and more, so you need physical stuff to store all that data. So if we can reduce the data amount we save, of course, it's always better. But yeah, cool, thanks. Hi Eric, thank you for your talk. You mentioned Tom Greenwood. He offered the sustainable manifesto, I think. Yes, amongst others. Yeah, I followed him recently and he wrote a post about sustainability, about the distinction between less harmful and sustainable. Did you read it? Do you have any thoughts about the distinction between less harmful and sustainable? I haven't read it, I think. I read a post, maybe that's related to it. I read a post about whether making things more quicker or easier to use, whether that can have a side effect of being used more and more, but that's maybe not what you're referring to. I think anything you can do to reduce your footprint is a good thing, just because it's less emissions, but also because you give an example for others to join. I think he was regarding the fact that everything is under this big term called sustainability, but not everything in there can be sustained. So the distinction between less harmful is a good thing, but don't re-wash it. Okay, like that. Yeah, probably if you take a step back and it's like the quote I had about the most sustainable feature is the feature you don't implement, that's probably something that is the first step to do. If you have a great idea, maybe think about it, sleep about it, and then maybe it's isn't such a great idea, so you don't do it, so it's much better. Get rid of things. Yes, also in the long run. Yeah, I understand what you mean. I hope you, I'm not a designer or something, but the goal for the website that I made, the small one, is that you don't look at it and think, oh, that's nothing on it, so it must be low in kilobytes. The goal was there to create something that it's not on first sight. Yeah, like what is this? Still looks kind of okay and still minimal. So I think for me, limitations help to make choices and to make better choices, so that can be one of the aspects of using creativity for good. Yeah, I think that it's okay to, I haven't read it, otherwise I could explain it better probably, but I saw some articles about freedom versus climate change, like what is our freedom, but now I'm getting philosophical. What is our freedom if on the long run we won't be able to do things we could because, yeah, we just, yeah, because it went wrong, let's say, or how can we be free as future generations cannot because of our activities now? So I think you can try to look at it in a positive way and use those boundaries to make good decisions, decisions that are sustainable. And still, I think maybe an example is, if I still have some time, Gutenberg, because it tries to replace all those page builders we got used to, and still, I think still it's much cleaner than a lot of page builders are or will be. Yeah. Thanks. But the neighbouring people cannot have green energy because of the big data. I read about that. That's true. If you use the energy for this, you cannot use it for that. There is a limit to everything. There is probably a limit to growth. I don't know when we'll realise that, but that's kind of complex, complicated. So we probably shouldn't go there. Yeah, true. Thank you.