Our mission-02-EN

This new website, Défis Humanitaires, takes over from my blog but on a different scale, as symbolised by its logo, with our planet that will be populated by 10 billion humans tomorrow. Tomorrow is in 2050, 32 years from now.

By that date, there will be 2.5 billion more of us, which is as many people as there were on Earth in 1950! At that time, Africa had 229.3 million inhabitants, and its population will grow from 1.46 billion in 2017 to 2.48 billion in 2050, which is as many as the world had in 1950! This is a veritable population explosion. So, will we be able to meet the immense challenges that this demographic growth will bring in terms of poverty, education, employment, infrastructure, in short, development and governance? That is the challenge!

1.60g of CO2 produced per visit, according to websitecarbon.com. The site was more polluting than 86% of the pages tested – to understand this score, see our article ‘Measuring the footprint of a website with websitecarbon.com’.

EcoIndex score: F (average of the site’s pages). Pages too heavy, too complex, too many requests (237).

Google PageSpeed Insights score: 18% on mobile, very slow and heavy site.

The site already benefited from eco-friendly hosting.

h2 intermediate title

We worked closely with the Défis Humanitaires teams to agree on an optimised design and content. In addition, all of the site’s features were reviewed to ensure that only the most relevant ones were retained.

We obviously developed a static site, as this is the most suitable technology for showcase sites. The appropriateness of resources is a fundamental principle of eco-design. The server works less, and therefore heats up less, as the pages are only generated once, rather than each time a new user visits them. The pages are lightweight because the static code is simple and lightweight. We further reduced the weight of the pages by optimising image formats and compression, and by making maximum use of browser features. We served the right image formats for the context—smaller sizes on mobile, for example, with Webp and svg as the priority. Fonts are variable, JavaScript use is kept to a minimum, and a whole host of best practices, including caching rules and lazy loading, were followed to avoid waste.

We delivered a first version of the site to Défis Humanitaires, with excellent Website Carbon, Eco-Index and PageSpeed scores. We were quite confident: out of 16 pages, we had 5 with an A rating, 9 with a B rating and only 2 with a C rating, which were the ones with the most content. This was already a remarkable achievement for such a visual site. We had activated all the usual levers at Internet 2000, and our site was much cleaner than average.

Title in h3

We delivered a first version of the site to Défis Humanitaires, with excellent Website Carbon, eco-Index and PageSpeed scores. We were quite confident: out of 16 pages, we had 5 in A, 9 in B and only 2 in C, the ones with the most content. This was already a tour de force for such a visual site. We had activated all the usual levers at Internet 2000, and our site was much cleaner than average.

0.04g of CO2 produced per visit (websitecarbon.com) for the heaviest page, making it a less polluting site than 92% of the pages tested, and a 95% reduction in CO2 emissions.

EcoIndex score: A (average for the site’s pages). Light, simple pages with few requests. EcoIndex indicates a 46.5% reduction in CO2 emissions compared to the original site.

Google PageSpeed Insight score: 96% on mobile, for a gain of 78 points.

The average weight of a page on the site is 500KB, which is half the average weight of a page on the internet today (source).

The benefit of all these good scores is not only a lower environmental impact, but also greater user comfort, even on mobile devices and even with a poor connection.

Défis Humanitaires x Internet 2000: an effective collaboration for a smooth, user-friendly website with a controlled environmental impact. Average enjoyment rating for this project: A.