Last week’s major news from the WordPress world!

This excellent post really helps break down the danger posed to a WordPress community that has its head buried in the sand when it comes to regulation and the future of the internet. There are forces at play around the world, in the name of privacy, “online harms” or national security that are going to exercise their power on the players that power the internet and this very much includes WordPress. While many WordPress site owners consider themselves immune from such regulation the reality is quite different and will catch many by surprise. The WordPress project, therefore, needs to quit pretending it is apolitical and take its seat at the table helping craft these laws to protect the smaller sites and users that use WordPress and more.

The following quote here really stuck out to me:

“This week, a lot of people were dangerously bad at their jobs and a threat to others.

They failed to understand the political implications of a bad-faith abuse of their systems; they failed to recognise a bad-faith abuse in the first place; they processed the situation through an American worldview which was completely irrelevant to the situation; in doing so, they created a timewasting argument about the wrong problem; they caused real unnecessary hurt to people who are the active targets for genocide”

While this quote was referring to the very visible war in Ukraine, how often has this problem manifested itself in more subtle ways such as in abuse to marginalized groups or the silencing of voices that could make a difference in the world. These are questions the WordPress community need to address. The stakes of not doing so will, otherwise, be the downfall of us all.

Gerry McGovern has been talking about the waste generated by our digital world since before many people making a living in WordPress were even on the internet. Every page we visit, email we write and text we send takes electricity and therefore creates carbon. This post looks at where some of the costs are and asks how we can more accurately measure these costs. It discusses our current economic model, that of planned obsolescence, and it’s cost on our current and future environment and asks how we can accurately measure and communicate the effects of each of our actions on our world.

A quote that really stuck out to me is the following:
Clothing retailer Asket details, for each garment they sell, the energy and water costs from manufacturing to selling. One of their T-shirts, for example, causes 1.9 kg of CO2. Which is roughly what I calculated is the amount of CO2 caused by creating a 1,000-word piece of content.”

This quote is amazing when you think of how much energy goes into 1,000 words of content, or an average blog post. Even the best tools tend to measure only the costs of downloading the content by end users. That isn’t the full cost and his point that we need a better way to account for more is right on.

For as long as many of us can remember the .jpeg, .png and .gif extensions have ruled for the images we put online. That might sound fine but how much else has advanced in our online tech while these formats stayed, for the most part, static. A few years ago that started to change with the introduction of the .webp format which is a much more efficient format for displaying online images. Efficiency matters when we’re measuring the ecological impact of our sites as each and every byte we transmit has a cost. It may seem trivial in isolation but across 43% of the web this cost really adds up.

Recently the WordPress performance team had proposed making .webp conversions the default when you upload an image to your site. Rather than embrace the future, however, this idea has now been scrapped with arguments such as the extra storage costs and other regressive views.

Make no mistake about it, this is yet another decision holding WordPress back. Even the surface argument of image storage is something of a straw-man in a system where many, if not most, sites are already using far more images sizes then they need. As such, I hope this becomes a very temporary setback and catches up to modern technology in the same way much of the rest of WordPress is doing with the block editor and more.

Finally, we’ve talked a lot about the environmental impact of our digital sites and content but how many know what the impact of their own site is? Beacon is a simple tool to check just that. While it’s not perfect it looks at the environmental impact any given page load you give it comparing the page weight, hosting, traffic and other factors and compares your impact with common digital activities such as watching a film on Netflix. Best of all, at least to me, it also gives you a history of the tests it runs against a given page so you can gauge how changes you make over time affect the environmental cost of your site and content.

If you regularly check core web vitals and other performance gauges, Beacon will feel very familiar to you. I invite you to check your own site today and then consider ways you can improve it (maybe by switching to webp).