Environmental impact of the Maxadev website
3 min • 8/1/2026
What we measure, what we improve, and how we go about it to reduce the energy consumed when browsing the site.
In brief
- EcoIndex rating A: 83/100, 0.238 MB, 23 requests, 241 DOM elements.
- Better than ~91% of the pages tested (ranked 45,582 out of 515,179).
- Estimated footprint for 1,000 visits: ~1.34 kg CO₂e and ~20.1 L of blue water.
- Target budgets: < 250 KB on first load, < 40 requests, DOM < 800 elements.
Why measure?
Every page view consumes energy: server processing, network transfer and rendering in the browser. Reducing page weight and the number of requests limits electricity use and extends the lifespan of devices (less pressure to replace hardware).
Eco-design also improves accessibility (a usable experience on slow connections) and search visibility through better Core Web Vitals.
Metrics & tools
- Lighthouse / Core Web Vitals: performance, interactivity, visual stability.
- EcoIndex (ecoindex.fr): an A→G rating based on DOM size, transferred weight and number of requests.
- Network analysis (DevTools, WebPageTest): compression, caching, TTFB.
- Bundle Analyzer: spotting heavy dependencies.
- Carbon estimators: order of magnitude of emissions per page (indicative only).
Measurements (EcoIndex)
Rating
A
83 / 100
Weight
0.238 MB
target ≤ 1.024 MB
DOM
241
target ≤ 600
Requests
23
target ≤ 40
- Page weight
- 0.238 MB | median: 2.41 MB | target: 1.024 MB
- Complexity (DOM)
- 241 | median: 693 | target: 600
- Server requests
- 23 | median: 78 | target: 40
Footprint for 1,000 visits
- Emissions: ~1.34 kg CO₂e
- Blue water consumption: ~20.1 L
For a sense of scale: ~1 kg CO₂e is roughly a 5 km car trip. A shower uses ~6 L/min.
Ranking: 45,582 out of 515,179 (roughly the top 9%, meaning ~91% of pages perform worse).
What we do on this site
- Next.js (App Router): static rendering or SSR depending on the need, to keep the cost per page down.
- Tailwind JIT with no heavy UI framework: only the utilities actually used are shipped.
- Optimized images: modern formats (WebP/AVIF) and SVG, sized as tightly as possible.
- Fonts hosted locally, with no needless render-blocking.
- No marketing trackers: no superfluous cookies.
- Minification & tree-shaking; no unnecessary polyfills.
- Less JavaScript: client components only where they are genuinely required.
- HTTP compression + CDN caching: better reuse from one page to the next.
- Hosting we control: an optimized server and virtual machine drawing under 5W.
EcoIndex in 30 seconds
EcoIndex combines three signals: DOM size, transferred weight and number of requests. Once normalized, they produce a rating (A to G) and an impact estimate (energy + CO₂).
Our target budgets on the key pages: < 250 KB on first load (empty cache), < 40 requests, < 800 DOM elements.
Best practices
- Keep dependencies to a minimum and prefer focused utilities.
- Strip unused glyphs from fonts (font subsetting).
- Defer non-critical JavaScript (dynamic import, lazy loading).
- Optimize images (compressed, web-ready formats).
- Set a performance budget in CI (Lighthouse/EcoIndex) and enforce it.
- Avoid expensive animations (layout thrashing, repeated reflows).
- Audit the bundle regularly (size, security) and delete dead code.
Limits & transparency
CO₂ estimates remain approximate: a single score does not capture the overall footprint (hosting, traffic, hardware). The point is to guide decisions, not to greenwash.