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Bringing the Green Web to WordPress

With Mozilla’s 2018 Internet Health Report finally shining a light on sustainability, and thanks to Chris Adams’ presentation at MozFest last year, I’ve been inspired to seriously up my game in terms of helping wherever I can in this field.

As a first step, I’ve put together a very simple WordPress widget that allows users to easily add The Green Web Foundation’s badge to their website. I think of the widget more as a marketing tool than anything else – i.e. it gets The Green Web Foundation into WordPress’ shop window.

You can see the widget in action on my blog (bottom of the sidebar).

My next steps within WordPress are to create a theme that incorporates all of the sustainable web design techniques. My goal is to make a theme that can theoretically score 100 with Ecograder. I say theoretically because some things are dependent on the host, MozRank etc. But if, for example, I could get the demo site for the theme near to 100, that’d be awesome. And I could also centre all of the content on the demo site around Internet sustainability.

Also, hello everyone! I’m Jack and I work as an engineer on the WordPress.com VIP team. I’m rather passionate about environmental issues. 🙂 I was the Green Party candidate in a UK parliamentary by-election last year which meant I appeared on TV a bit!

3 Responses to Bringing the Green Web to WordPress

  • Hey, this is all great stuff to see!

    I was wondering a couple of things:

    1. Are you aware of a wordpress widget that could display an environmental “grade” for the server it is hosted on. Spreading the word about Green Web is great, but I can imagine how it might be ironic for some to add it to a blog where the server isn’t running on clean energy for example. (The down side would be people with a poor grade not wanting to display such a widget.)

    2. It always makes sense to evaluate the big players because that’s where the environmental impact is: FB, Google, Apple, Amazon… but I wonder how the growing “Indie web” could be rated? I saw here http://www.clickclean.org/usa/en/ that Twitter has an F! If I were to switch to micro.blog am I helping the environment?

    Just a few thoughts 🙂 Not entirely fleshed-out.

    Reply

  • Tom Greenwood

    Good work Jack. Hopefully the widget will help to raise awareness with the WordPress community.

    The GWF database is a really fantastic resource and we are using it a lot. We finally just got our friends at Positive Internet (aka Timpani in the WordPress community) listed in their database as they are really passionate about green issues and have their own data centre running on renewable energy. They now finally can get that smiley face from the GWF API 🙂

    Reply

  • My site is green, however I tried to make it grade green, it did not look good. If there are maybe some functions that can be added I would love to know more and get recommendations

    Reply

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