Is this the WWW we have dreamed of?

If “we are the ones we have been waiting for ”, and today technological and digital advancement is what we dreamed of for more than 20 years ago, when we started developing websites, I believe that we are also responsible for making the digital world more ecological.

This week we continue to be inspired by Gerry McGovern's reflections because I believe that they add value if we want to have a sustainable Web. I encourage you to read McGovern's World Wide Waste book.

If this Web, in which we have a unique digital experience , multi-device systems and applications that work even on television, with virtual reality, or with augmented reality is not the Web we want, what are its main problems according to McGovern?

The web is obese

It is true that the current digital experience is full of creativity, innovation, animations and transitions, but the loading time of a web page has been getting worse over the years, this means more weight, but it also means more energy consumed or consumed.

Did you know that in 1994 there were 3,000 websites and in 2019 there are an estimated 1.7 billion? Wow! We are talking about a website for every 3 people. This is a dream - that each person can have their digital business card - but it has devastating consequences, since if in 1994 the weight of a web page was 100Kb, this weight cannot be compared to the weight of 4Mb that can have web pages today, and 10.3 seconds of minimum loading time on desktop , or 27.3 seconds on mobile . According to Radware , this mobile loading time was 4.3 seconds in 2013!

Considering that people hate slow web pages or slow web sites, you can understand that the environment will not be the only one affected by the performance of your website. Your business too.

The following data should be the priority in your concerns:

53% of mobile website visitors left a page that took more than 3 seconds to load (Google, 2018)

a site that loads in 3 seconds experiences 22% fewer page views, a 50% higher bounce rate, and 22% fewer conversions than a site that loads in 1 second, while a site that loads loads in 5 seconds, experiences 35% fewer page views, 105% higher bounce rate, and 38% fewer conversions (Radware, 2015)

Where is the problem?

The problem is in the current trends - which are at the same time what makes us love the current web - of using images and videos for everything. We love videos, whether you are a user or a specialist in Digital Marketing.

In fact, video is a priority right now for almost all brands that want to position themselves correctly in the market. It is even said that “in 2022 online videos will represent more than 82% of all consumer Internet traffic, 15 times more than in 2017!

This has important ecological consequences. Imagine the pollution, or at least the energy waste, that a web page that weighs 5Mb can cause and 1 million people load it during a day.

"Text is the most ecological way of communicating" and I understand that as a clothing store , you need to show your products in images or videos. My recommendation is that you optimize as much as possible. Because the weight of the pages means “high processing demands once they are downloaded”.

Outdated content

Another problem, in a website that has gained so much weight in such a short time, is the "tremendous amount of outdated content." Content, but also code. How many months have you not updated your website ? Look at this data:

"By cleaning their JavaScript code, Wikipedia estimated that they saved 4.3 terabytes a day of data bandwidth for their visitors." There are 700 fewer trees that you would have to plant to alleviate pollution.

The WWW of our times does not help save the planet when it is not able to reduce the digital weight, you are not able to clean your website - full of duplicate content and duplicate URLs - meaningless images are used, when they could be texts , or the images are not optimized, in addition to all the test code that continues to coexist with the production code, in the cloud .

Images

We live in the era of stock images - I am personally a huge fan of this model - but we see many websites full of these images, sometimes repeated, without context and whose communication has difficulties in adding value.

Are you sure that an image is worth more than a thousand words, always? It's urgent to ask yourself the right questions and think before selecting one or more images - do you really need a high resolution 4k image? - for a certain web page, to avoid “digital pollution” and digital waste.

By the way, in a future article we could talk about how fake images and content, which affect performance, also affect SEO or conversion. How about?

Images are "genuinely useful when they help people better understand what a product looks like or how it works."

Video

Like images, videos are also essential in any digital marketing campaign. We must be video-first , and this fact makes us assume that “a video is the best option”.

The video should also be used only when "we know that it makes a real difference", because in addition to meaning more weight for the web page, which is to say more resources and more energy, the videos if not implemented correctly make it difficult to scroll ( navigation ), and make it difficult to access “specific information quickly”.

JavaScript

Currently, there are many frameworks and plugins of JavaScript and other libraries do not know. The point is that in the last decade JavaScript has grown a lot, as a programming language, but also in weight in bytes .

Considering that we use JavaScript to process images or other content in real time, good use of JavaScript also plays an important role in mitigating pollution and carbon footprint.

It is also about putting yourself in the user's shoes and remembering that not everyone has the best 5G- powered phones . That is why it is important and it should be "a priority to minimize your JavaScript" so that the "time spent executing JavaScript stops far exceeding the time spent by the browser in the rest of the loading process".

Emails

Too many emails. Many said that email had died with the appearance of new communication channels, such as WhatsApp, Facebook, Facebook Messenger, Slack, etc. But email has not died , and it seems that it wants to continue living for many more years .

"According to Statista , this year more than 300 billion emails will be sent and received daily." This number is surely higher due to the pandemic , but it represents about "30 billion more per day than the emails sent in 2017."

I don't know how many emails you send per day, but I wonder if they will all be necessary and if this sending will not have secondary effects on your productivity and on the efficiency of your organization?

According to a 2019 study in the UK, 64 million unnecessary emails are sent daily. In this way I find it very difficult to help trees fight pollution. It is a good time to think before sending your next email.

Conclusion

Is this the WWW we have dreamed of? As a self-critic, we know that "the impulse of many organizations when they need to attract the attention of potential clients is to produce a lot of content, new designs and codes".

I understand it, but to make the WWW, the Web we have dreamed of , in addition to adding value to people's lives, we also need to do the daily exercise of choosing what “we will not do, what we will reuse, what we will share and that we will erase ”.

It's about creating a habit where "whenever you add something, you remove another" - how do you see it? This will allow you to have fewer distractions, more attention to what you do, "you will depend less on digital and more on your brain", the Web will be more responsible and the environment will appreciate it.

Do you think that by reducing the amount of content we generate we will have a better WWW?