There’s no point providing carbon measurement solutions if we’re not going to measure the energy needed to run our own website. What’s more, there’s no point if we’re not going to act. The new Path Net Zero website has been meticulously designed with its carbon footprint in mind and currently, our lowest scoring page (for example our homepage) tested at just 0.02g C02 every time someone visits the page — that’s 98% greener than all other websites out there.

We’ve detailed how much carbon is produced every time someone visits a specific page (you can find it in the bottom left-hand corner).

You can check your own website over at www.websitecarbon.com and after you’ve spent about half an hour looking at all the other websites you regularly use make sure you come back here to us!

Since the birth of OLED screens and their ever-increasing popularity, the colour of your website plays into how energy efficient it is. Yes! That’s right. The colours used determines how much energy a website uses to load. For example, Black is the most energy efficient. Why? Because with an OLED screen, they can turn off a pixel to give you what’s called ‘True Black’. If the design therefore is black, then all those pixels aren’t required to turn on, thus saving energy.

The opposite and most energy intensive is white. So all those websites out there which are nice and bright, aren’t actually doing any favours to planet Earth

In the middle are Red, Green, and Blue in that order.

In geek speak, Palpatine was right: The Dark Side truly is better.

We’re sure all of you want your branding to be on point. Even more so when it comes to using your brands chosen font-family on your website. But here lies another problem. All those font files and font weights start to add up.

So how did we get around this?

The Path Net Zero website uses only system fonts. More specifically, this website only uses Arial and a tiny bit of Times New Roman and Georgia. Just as regular as you can be.

What’s a system font you ask? A system font is what’s pre-loaded into your computers operating system from the off. They are your standard fonts which can be found on every computer around the world and usually consist of the following:

Arial
Verdana
Tahoma
Trebuchet MS
Times New Roman
Georgia
Courier New

A few more have been added along the road, but the fonts listed above are typically your standard.

In the world of energy usage and carbon emissions, images are the devil. They can easily take what used to be a slimline site and quickly add on huge amounts of weight. Unnecessary weight in our eyes. So, we’ve stripped them out. Sure, we’ve kept in the icons and small illustrations but the largest icon we use is only 21kb in size. Much slimmer than an image which when already compressed has the potential to come in at over 100kb — some larger images can easily be over 1mb in size.

You’re on this website because you are environmentally conscious, and you want to be engaged in making a difference. We are therefore pretty confident that you know what a forest, polar bear, penguin, ocean, or mountain looks like already.

It seems that wherever we look these days, a website must move, pop, slide and fade. Yes! It looks pretty for the first few times of viewing but sooner or later it just gets so tiresome…and also repetitive and not very energy efficient.

All those movements require extra CSS or Javascript to run. That means our external files are getting larger and larger.

The Path Net Zero website has done away with all of that. We’ve gone back to basics with the absolute minimum use of animations on our buttons.