In which we discover the internet is killing the planet, blame your website, and recommend our free audit.
It is, at time of writing, 35 degrees in some parts of the UK. The nation is not coping.
Argos has sold out of fans. The last bag of charcoal left my local petrol station forecourt at 8am on Saturday, purchased by a distinctly harassed looking middle aged man in flip flops and a slightly too short t-shirt.
An immaculately coiffured BBC correspondent is currently reporting live from an ice cream van parked up outside what used to be the swimming baths but is now a Tesco Metro, to explain slowly and patiently to viewers that it is hot, whilst in the background of the shot, a gawping teenager dressed perplexingly all in black lets an entire 99 slide from cone to pavement.
Meanwhile, the rest of us are doing what we Brits do best in extreme heat. Complaining about it while simultaneously insisting we love it, burning to a colour not found in nature, and recovering from a weekend drinking warm pre-mixed cans of G&T in a garden that smelt of factor 50 and quiet desperation.
The Met Office has issued amber alerts. Parts of the UK are currently hotter than Rome, Athens, and Barcelona, which would feel like more of an achievement if anyone had slept in days.
Which brings me, somewhat unexpectedly, to carbon-neutral websites.
When I first encountered the concept, I sighed with deep and weary scepticism.
It’s fair to say I raised an eyebrow higher than Roger Moore in his screen test for 007. “What GB News despising, sackcloth-adorned, soy latte madness be this?” I mused, as I ironed my Chinese-manufactured Union Jack chinos.
But then I explored the concept in more detail.
Your website is likely a boorish wastrel
The internet accounts for roughly the same proportion of global carbon emissions as the entire aviation industry. If it were a country, it would be the sixth largest consumer of electricity on the planet, sitting somewhere between Russia and Japan.
The average web page has ballooned from around 700KB in 2010 to approximately 2.5MB today. That growth has not, for the most part, been driven by better content. It has been driven by heavier images that nobody optimised, video backgrounds that nobody asked for, chat widgets, bloated analytical code, retargeting pixels, and fonts. Many fonts. Many, many, many fonts. Most of them nasty.
Consequently, servers have to work harder. They consume more energy. They generate more heat. The planet, which has been throwing critical error warnings since the Industrial Revolution and whose logs nobody has checked, gets incrementally warmer.
A single data centre can consume as much water for cooling as a small city.
Microsoft’s water consumption increased by 34% in a single year, a figure they attributed largely to AI infrastructure. Google’s carbon emissions grew by 48% over four years, also largely due to AI. These are not projections. These are numbers those companies published themselves, presumably with some reluctance.
Let’s generate some AI images of Nero while Rome burns
And don’t get me started on AI. I love it, but even so.
A single AI-generated image uses roughly the same energy as fully charging your phone. Even a simple AI query like asking a chatbot to draft an email, summarise a document, generate a product description uses around ten times the energy of a standard Google search. Training a single large AI model can emit as much carbon as five cars produce across their entire working lives.
And somewhere, right now, a marketing team is using AI to generate multiple revisions of a blog post that will join the roughly 90% of internet content that receives no traffic whatsoever.
Not that any of this is obvious when you are typing a prompt. You type, the answer appears, and whatever is happening in a data centre in Nevada to make that possible is very much someone else’s problem. But as weekends like this demonstrate, it is not, as it turns out, someone else’s problem. It is real, and the numbers are even more disagreeable than a warm G&T in 33-degree heat.
What a well-built website actually does in the heat
In addition to bestowing sanctimonious smugness upon the operator, a well-optimised site is the digital equivalent of a suitably chilled drink and adequate shade. It loads quickly. It does not make demands on the user’s processor, their bandwidth, or their goodwill. It does what it says it will do, immediately, and then gets out of the way.
Compressed images. Clean code. No scripts running in the background for tools you cancelled two years ago. Hosting that does not share its resources with forty other struggling sites on the same server.
Not complicated, but depressingly rarer than an unpainted roundabout.
What to do about it
But for goodness sake, here I am providing moderately interesting information when what I should be doing is segueing, with less subtlety than a Ryanair cabin crew announcing the scratch card trolley, into shameless and utterly cringeworthy self-promotion. Apologies. Let me remedy that at once.
Here at Katatomic we offer a free website audit. It is human-led rather than automated, which means it takes a little longer but tells you considerably more. Submit a request at komprehend.co.uk and we will take a proper look at aspects like page speed, technical issues, the things quietly costing you visitors and enquiries.
Submit a request. See what comes back. If the results are as uncomfortable as the temperature we’re here to help.
Or, if the very idea makes you weary, do nothing. Sit in whatever patch of shade you can find, drink something cold, and talk to us in a few weeks when the country has returned to its natural state of drizzle.