Piggystack

Let's build a greener web

Piggystack.dev was created to bring attention to the hidden environmental costs of the bloated and inefficient websites in modern web development (affectionately called a piggystack) — not all websites, of course!

Think it's not a problem?
Look at the size of the top 50 worldwide websites
<Alarming statistics>
+41%
Increase in median website size since 2017
Source: HttpArchive.org
2204 KB
2021 Median website size
Source: HttpArchive.org
piggy
<Truth bomb>

Excessive energy consumption to download and display a piggystack affects our planet.

Electricity bolt illustrating high energy consumption
<Glimmer of hope>

The great news is — we as developers can help fight climate change without leaving our chairs simply by changing our development practices now.

The Mission

Make lower "energy impact" a priority and best practice in web development so we can do our small part in fighting climate change.

Help guide creators and developers in thoughtful eco-friendly technology choices for their websites from community input.

Greenify Your Websites

Reduce. Reduce. Reduce.

These optimization suggestions are straight outta Page Speed Insights (with some paraphrasing). This is an excellent resource for determining if you have a piggystack

  • Reduce CPU utilization
    Avoid big honkin' javascript frameworks for simple websites
  • Reduce network requests
    Use fewer network requests to deliver your website. HTTP requests are energy consumers.
  • Reduce the weight of your web pages
    Go on a byte diet. Have a target "byte budget" in mind. Stick to it.
    • Ship less Javascript and reduce unused JavaScript
    • Reduce image sizes with better compression and modern formats
    • Reduce the number of custom fonts, graphics, animation, and images
Open book

Further Reading