Performance Optimization, Sustainability, and the Tradeoff

Welcome to Sustain WP, a limited podcast series about digital sustainability and WordPress. I'm your host Nahuai Badiola and in this episode I will be talking about the environmental pillar of sustainability with 6 amazing guests.

In the previous episode Hannah and I introduced the concept of three pillars (or strands) of sustainability. And in the next 3 episodes we will dedicate one to each pillar.

I had my reservations to start with the environmental pillar because it's usually the one it's more known and part of the aim of this podcast it's to broaden the view of sustainability. But in other hand, the environmental part was the entry point for almost every guest I interview and it was also for me. That reason, together with the tight relationship between the social and economical part, which I wanted to keep together (one after another), were the reasons to finally maintain this "more traditional" structure of episodes.

So during this episode we'll have 6 different points of view on how they see the environmental pillar on digital sustainability.

I start talking with Tom Greenwood, co-founder of Wholegrain Digital a UK based WordPress agency, author of the book "Sustainable Web Design" and one of the creators of Website Carbon Calculator tool. Let's hear what he has to say on how he would explain the importance of the  environmental part on digital sustainability to someone new to the topic.

During the conversation with Tom we mentioned Tim Frick several times since his been involved with digital sustainability since early 2000's. He has a WordPress agency called Mightybytes and it's been one of the leaders behind the new web sustainability guidelines that a W3C community group released recently. He, and his team at Mightybytes, also created Ecograder another great tool that gives you digital sustainability recommendations. 

Indeed I started asking about the aim this tool and then we moved on to the W3C guidelines.  

Then we move to someone that contributes directly on making WordPress more environmentally sustainable. We listen to Adam Silverstein, who is a Developer Relations Engineer at Google, WordPress core committer and part of the WordPress Performance Team. He reflects on how we always want more and the impact that it could have. He also touches on servers, green hosting, energy needed to power every device and some examples on how a change on WordPress can have a significant environmental impact.

In this podcast series I also wanted to know other opinions about sustainability, beyond WordPress community, so I invited Richard Littauer, who is organizer of Sustain OSS community and host of the Sustain podcast. He has an interesting point of view regarding the reasons behind the environmental issues on digital sustainability.  

Then we also talk, not only about digital sustainability but also events with Julia Golomb. She is a full-time contributor to the WordPress Community Team, sponsored by Automattic, and she was an organizer on WCUS 2023.

The last guest of this episode it's, Juan Hernando, dear friend and Community Team Program Manager and WordCamp Europe 2024 lead organiser, who is  sponsored by Weglot. I really liked his answer on how we could use some of the learnings on the environmental area and try to apply them to the other two pillars. 

That was pretty interesting, wasn't it?

You will be hearing more opinions of these guests and some others in the next episodes.

Summary

Taking about the guests, I feel like they were really on point. So I even doubted if a summary, from my part, was really necessary. But I guess someone could benefit from it.

So, the first point could be that when we communicate about environmental impact of, let's say, internet, it's important to know who are you talking to. Knowing that, you can use web performance and conversion as "selling point", for example.

We have nice tools like Website Carbon Calculator and Ecograder that were created to help raising awareness about digital sustainability and they could be a good entry point for some users or customers.

Also having the first draft of the sustainability web design guidelines, created under the umbrella of W3C, it's a really nice starting point.

In other hand, we mentioned how using a green hosting can help to mitigate some of the problems, but also how making a small changes on the CMS can have significant environmental impact. We'll talk more about this in episode 5.

Event's it's another thing that we have to add to the mix aside from digital sustainability. Indeed we will dedicate the whole episode 6 to explore how we can make WordPress events more sustainable, not only environmentally but also socially and economically.

Outro

Thanks for listening, I hope you found the episode and our guest opinions as interesting as I did. 

You can find all the resources mentioned during the episode in the show notes.

If you want to share your take on this topic you can do it leaving a comment on the website (you can go to sustainwp.com/2) and if you think that the episode could be interesting to a WordPress colleague please share it.

In the next episode we will be talking about the social pillar.

I'm really looking forward to it. Bye bye!

Resources

• Sustainable Web Design
• Website Carbon Calculator
• Ecograder
• Web Sustainability Guidelines (W3C)
• Web Sustainability Guidelines at glance (W3C)
• Tom Greenwood's book on digital sustainability
• Tim Fricks' book on digital sustainability
• Sustain OSS
• Sustain podcast
• Sustain podcast episode with Nahuai
• Call for applications Green Web Fellowship 2023/24

Nahuai Badiola I'm a WordPress developer, theme and plugin creator, I also write WP code tutorials and I'm passionate about web sustainability.

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Guest