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How-toBandwidth Conservation Society
Parkinson's Law of the Internet states that whatever the bandwidth, applications will always evolve to consume more than is currently available.
Accessibility. Faster connections in themselves are not threatening the access to the internet. The problem is that most websites will adapt to the ever faster connections, which makes them gradually inaccessible for people with slower connections. Today, most websites are impossible to download with a dial-up connection, because they have become too corpulent.
Many people in remote locations and the developing world do not have fast Internet connections and won't be getting them any time soon. [source]
Energy use. The size of the average web page increased at least threefold from 2010 to 2018. The growth in data traffic surpasses the advances in energy efficiency (the energy required to transfer 1 megabyte of data over the Internet), resulting in more and more energy use.
Over and above this, “heavier” or “larger” websites not only increase energy use in the network infrastructure, but they also shorten the lifetime of computers — larger websites require more powerful computers to access them. This means that more computers need to be manufactured, which is a very energy-intensive process.[source]
Openness. Everything we do to make it harder to create a website or edit a web page, and harder to learn to code by viewing source, promotes that consumerist vision of the web.
Pretending that one needs a team of professionals to put simple articles online will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Overcomplicating the web means lifting up the ladder that used to make it possible for people to teach themselves and surprise everyone with unexpected new ideas.
It is vital that the web stay participatory. That means not just making sites small enough so the whole world can visit them, but small enough so that people can learn to build their own, by example. Bloat makes the web inaccessible. source.
How to build a leaner website
- Compress all images (see my notes).
- Reduce the number of images.
- No Javascript.
- Use default typefaces.
- Reduce CSS.
- Use Semantic HTML.
- Remove comment sections and other social sharing features.
Some of the points above sourced from James Gallagher
Reading material
- The website obesity crisis
- Web Design Guidelines for Low Bandwidth
- Faster internet is impossible
- How to build a low-tech internet
- Why we need a speed limit for the internet
- Website carbon emissions
- Software disenchantment
- Hello world
- Gopher protocol
- The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
- Webpage size. Why is it important? And how do you optimize it?
- Project Gemini
- The Wider Net
- Appropriate information-communications technologies for developing countries