In praise of tiny websites
Plus: make every search 1/3rd as polluting (maybe)
This issue: useful tiny websites; lock in smaller google searches, and many links.
But first, self promotion:
Witness me
I’m speaking at BookNet Canada Tech Forum on Feb 3rd (remote). Deets.
Small websites: an appreciation
In the beginning there was the WWW Project homepage, and it was small, at 4 kilobytes. Fast-forward 35 years and the average web page weighs 2903kB (HTTPArchive).
In the web’s golden age there were some valiant attempts to stop the bloat - see the 10kb webpage competition by A List Apart (2007) and The 5k award (2001-2005).
There are plenty of people still practicing the craft of light-weight web design today; you can find directories of them collected by 215kB.club, 512kB.club, mdibaiee, and others.
Some every-day useful lightweights sites
Search: Wiby.me, 9kB, and DuckDuckGo Lite. Also see below for tips on making Google Search slimmer.
Weather: wttr.in. 11 times smaller than weather.com (6.8MB).
Wikipedia is already optimized with a typical page weight of 632kB.
Website carbon calculator.
News: Text-only NPR and CNN Lite.
Social: Facebook Lite.
Video: Youtube Go disappeared in 2022. You can still Enable Data Saver Mode: In the YouTube app, navigate to Settings > Data Saving and toggle “Data saving mode”.
Lucky dip
Art in 10kB…Tic-tac-toe in under 3kB…Global Discovery Network…HTTP Status Codes…The no-js club…Rectangles…Web Performance Leaderboard…HTML.Earth (a lite site generator)…and of course This Is A Web Page (and it’s sweary friend).
Make Google Search light by default
A few months ago I shared the UDM=14 querystring trick for Google Search. Add UDM=14 to your querystring and Google will serve a stripped-down results page minus sponsored content, ads, content snippets, or AI summaries.
Applying UDM=14 could reduce the data overhead of search by as much as 2/3rds. And that’s just on the data transmitted; presumably there is less draw on the data-centers, too (no need to generate those AI article summaries).
Wouldn’t it be nice to bypass the normal result page and go straight to the cleaned-up version? Easy-peasy - make a bookmarklet or just modify your browser’s search settings.
Go to Settings -> Search Engine -> Manage Search Engines and Site Search (for Chrome or Firefox).
Under “Site Search,” click Add.
Shortcut: Give it a keyword like
gw(Google Web).URL: Use this exact string:
https://www.google.com/search?q=%s&udm=14
Make it the default.
What a savings
Using the UDM=14 trick strips about 3MB from the results page.
Let’s pretend everyone did this:
There are 16.4 billion Google Searches a day.
3MB average savings (UDM=14 vs. a regular SERP).
16 Billion searches x 3MB = 492,000,000MB (492 petabytes); 14 exabytes monthly.
Total internet traffic is 272EB monthly, so UDM=14 cuts internet traffic by 1/20th. Which saves [big number] of tons of CO2.
Admittedly my maths is riddled with dodgy assumptions, but it’s fun to dream. And you can always switch to Ecosia or DuckDuckGo.
Links of interest
All Tech is Human’s 2025 review & Climate Action Tech 2025 review.
A day in the carbon life of an LLM prompt [Green IO Paris 2025].
Nearly 7,000 of the world’s 8,808 data centers are built in the wrong climate - Tom’s Hardware.
CDP Review - Sustainability leadership is increasingly translating into financial outperformance, but only for a relatively small group of companies. Most progress: Japan.
Microsoft buys another 3 million tons of carbon removals, as part of a larger set of purchasing agreements.
eBay has a new transition plan for net zero by 2045. Here’s the plan (PDF). Sounds like they are already 100% renewable electricity for offices/datacenters. Lots of bullish predictions about diverting waste via “recommerce”.
The Year in Cheer (Reasons to be Cheerful).
What I’m up to
I’m still adjusting after our move back to the UK. Doing some consultancy and trying to figure out the UK UX scene after 15 years away.
Listening: Moisturizer (Wet Leg)
Reading: The Museum Accessibility Spectrum and The Future by Naomi Alderman
Playing: Arc Raiders (job training for the post-apocalypse). Don’t shoot.
Watching: I’m stuck half-way through ep 1 of Pluribus.
Get in touch
Reader mail lets me know I have readers - get in touch if you want to chat digital sustainability, or to share your favorite light websites, etc.
That’s it for this issue, thanks for reading.