Sustainable Web Design : How much can environmental friendly design principles improve a website's carbon footprint?

Sammanfattning: This study investigates the impact of sustainable design practices on the visual elements of websites, with a focus on their potential to mitigate environmental harm. The principal area of interest is efficiency - designing web pages to minimize energy usage.  In pursuit of sustainable design principles, websites from companies and organizations that advocate for the environment were analyzed. This was done to determine whether these websites are implementing sustainable design principles within their visual elements. Two custom React web pages were subsequently developed: one implementing design principles from the analyzed websites and the other integrating sustainable design principles. Standardized tools and metrics, including Ecograder, Google Lighthouse, and Google PageSpeed Insights, were used to assess the performance and energy efficiency of these pages in order to measure any discrepancies. From previous research, the results identified five most common design principles as principal considerations in website design. Interestingly, many of the companies/organizations were found to partially or completely disregard these sustainable design principles in their web pages. Additionally, the React web page that incorporated sustainable design principles demonstrated a significantly lighter page weight compared to its modern design counterpart, resulting in less energy usage. Further research is needed though to corroborate these results due to the limitations of the measurements in this study.