Lazy Embed
Videos are one of the largest assets that can be loaded on a webpage, and as such are one of the largest contributors to slow performance and high carbon emissions.
In fact, adding a Youtube embed to a page using the latest default WordPress theme, increased the page transfer size from 21 kb to 973 kb, and loaded an additional 27 resources. That’s an increase in transfer size of 4533%. Adding a Vimeo video increased the transfer from 21 kb to 276 kb, an increase in transfer size of 1214%, and loaded an additional 7 resources.
The Lazy Embed plugin defers the loading of any resource required for playing the video until the video is requested to be played. It does this by adding a srcdoc attribute to the iframe which shows in place of the normal iframe content.
The Index
The Index is a quantitive measure of website performance, accessibility, and sustainability across industries. It’s designed to highlight issues, and recommend opportunities for improvement, that help organisations produce and optimise websites that minimise their CO2 emissions, and provide a better, more inclusive user experience.
Website Carbon for WordPress
The internet consumes a lot of electricity. 416.2TWh per year to be precise. To give you some perspective, that’s more than the entire United Kingdom.
From data centres to transmission networks to the devices that we hold in our hands, it is all consuming electricity, and in turn producing carbon emissions.
The Website Carbon plugin integrates with the Website Carbon API developed by Wholegrain Digital to automate the process of calculating the emissions of a WordPress website.