Determine scope/features

[LittleBigThing]

I'd like to open this issue to determine the scope of this plugin. I think that this is important before we work further on the features.

I think that the goal is to spread awareness about the fact that websites have an actual carbon footprint. WordPress (WP) is a good ‘tool’ to do this due to its widely adoption/market share. Moreover, we have the Site Health tool to start with which we can use to provide information within WP related to the site(homepage)‘s carbon footprint. After providing this information, we could encourage developers/owners/administrators of the site to improve the site‘s sustainability (= action, see separate future issue). This would require a Handbook page with information on how to lower a website’s footprint, for example.

• use the Site Health tool (I would ;-))

Which information could be made available* and what is useful?

• Host
• Country
• Using green/renewable energy or not
• Average carbon intensity for a certain year
• Homepage size in kilobytes (KB)
• estimated CO₂ emission per page view (and related things, such as difference when using green energy and new vs. returning visits)

*data available using different (free) APIs

The questions:

• Which ones are crucial? I felt free to ‘check’ a couple of them already.
• Which one would be a test, which one as info? The Site Health tool has a default ‘Status’ tab containing tests and a second ‘Information’ tab.
• Are there any other things that would be useful?

[YellowlimeNL]

Would be great to list historic data, to provide insigth on how the emission has changed.

What I think is crucial, looking at your list:

• Host
• Country
• Using green/renewable energy or not
• Average carbon intensity for a certain year
• Homepage size in kilobytes (KB)
• estimated CO2 emission per page view (and related things, such as difference when using green energy and new vs. returning visits)

[LittleBigThing]

Btw, the APIs this information is based on are:

• https://admin.thegreenwebfoundation.org/api-docs/ by the Green Web Foundation
• https://api.websitecarbon.com/ by the Website Carbon Calculator by Wholegrain Digital

If you know other with additional information and you think it is valuable, please share them. :-)

[LittleBigThing]

Would be great to list historic data, to provide insigth on how the emission has changed.

If you by ‘historic’ mean how the size of for example of the homepage evolved in time, that is in my opinion not possible.

For example, the Website Carbon API caches the result of 24h. After 24h, it is measured again.

Also, I think that this tool should be as clear and minimal as possible, in line with WordPress’ philosophy (decision not option in a way :-)). We can point the user to the online tool itself to experiment further.

[LittleBigThing]

To add to this a couple of thoughts:

I think that information about the host/server would be better added to the existing information under Site Health > Info > Server tab. I am referring to

• Host
• Country

in the list above.

Also, I am not sure whether the country for example is always relevant: how about CDNs or when a hosting provider has different server locations?
The name of the hosting provider seems interesting (to me) so that people can contact them if they have not arranged the hosting by themselves.