The average web page now weighs roughly 3MB. A typical page on this new consultancy site, even with images, weighs just 80kb. That is a 97% reduction in data payload.

I built this site to align with the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines as a working proof of concept. You can design a visually engaging, professional platform without relying on heavy data transfers.

The impact of a strict data budget

Cutting page weight does more than reduce server costs. It directly lowers the energy required to transmit and render the interface, reducing the carbon footprint of every single visit.

It also improves the user experience. A lightweight page loads almost instantly, removing the friction of waiting. Lowering data requirements also makes the service genuinely inclusive for people relying on older hardware or navigating slow mobile networks.

Engineering for efficiency

To hit these aggressive performance targets, I moved away from heavy application frameworks and focused on returning to native web standards.

  • I built the platform on Astro to deliver static HTML by default. Stripping out client-side JavaScript entirely reduces data transfer and eliminates browser processing overhead.
  • The typography payload is strictly limited. The site loads only one optimised web font and relies on native system fonts for structural UI text to prevent render-blocking requests.
  • Lucide icons are injected directly into the markup as inline SVGs. This removes the latency and weight of downloading external icon font files.
  • The build leverages Tailwind CSS to compile an exceptionally small global stylesheet, automatically purging all unused utility classes during the production build.
  • I enforce a strict media budget with sparse use of images. When raster graphics are necessary, they are aggressively compressed in squoosh and lazy-loaded.
  • I’ve used a variety of image processing effects aimed at reducing file-size, including b&w, simplifying images, and using abstract SVG patterns.

Treating data as a finite budget forces better technical decisions, turning the site itself into a live demonstration of low-carbon web architecture.