I came across a post on CMS Wire Breakfast Bytes about reducing website weight for digital sustainability. This is admiral at all levels, not only does it make sense at an environmental level but it improved performance across the board (and likely readability, usability, and accessibility). I am not linking to the CMS Wire version. Why?

The problem with linking to new aggregators like CMS Wire is that these are often 100% full reposts of articles also living elsewhere on the internet. In the case of this digital sustainability post, CMS Wire is adding a ton of extra digital cruft, with is ironic given the topic. Why not just link or have a leading snippet that provides value and interest to the full post? So let’s just do that, Gerry McGovern, Reducing website weight: “Web pages are full of crap and they’re also made from crap. Average webpage weight is now around 4 MB. Think of 4 million 4 MB crap-making, toxic-spewing, filthy old diesel trucks of crap, polluting the Web and polluting the planet.”

I do take umbrage with WordPress being a problem and should be moved away from. Good sites can be built on WordPress with sustainability in mind. There are agencies that specifically focus on this issue Aline Consulting and Wholegrain Digital are the first which come to mind.

WordPress core could certainly add sustainability into the mix. How much of core really needs to be downloaded at once? Can the install process ask to run with a default super minimal theme rather than the TwentyABCDEFs that come out every year? Can WordPress ship with minimized JavaScript yet offer full source remotely?

I think this an opportunity for an ultra lightweight distribution of WordPress. Let’s call it WrdPrs!

One more thing, you can check out your site’s impact at Website Carbon Calculator!