Hey, I'm Fershad

A personal look back at the year that was, 2022.

ReqCheck is a tool I’ve built to help folks find out where all the different requests made by a web page are served from. I’m hoping it can be a tool for both web sustainability and web performance folks to use when auditing websites.

I’ve been thinking about how we can drive broader change to make the web more sustainable and performant. As I’ll get into, I believe a large part of that comes from the defaults set by the tools and services we use.

As COP27 approaches, I thought it would be “fun” to take a look at this year’s COP homepage. How does it do in terms of website sustainability?

Measuring the carbon emissions of websites and apps is no easy thing. Most tools use the amount of data being transferred to calculate the overall emissions. But to get more detailed, relevant results we need to go beyond just data transfer.

Uploading and downloading the bits and bytes that make up the internet uses a lot of electricity. Breaking the internet down to a systems level, data transfer over networks accounts for an estimated 14% of the web’s total electricity consumption.

I share some thoughts on the new proposal put forward by the MS Edge DevTools team for a new “Sustainability” tab to be included in the Edge browser’s DevTools.

In this post we’ll build a simple API to calculate the carbon emissions for digital data transfer using CO2.js and Cloudflare Workers.

Knowing the carbon intensity of the electricity grids in which code runs can allow developers to make informed decisions about where/when to run their code.

Performance Insights is a tool by Builder.io (http://builder.io/) which, in their words, allows you to learn what improvements can have the greatest impact on your site's performance.

YouTube embeds can added megabytes of data to a website, even if they are not watched by the user. This post looks at a way to use Cloudflare Workers plus a facade to reduce that initial data load.

I was recently shown a code snippet that that a designer friend implemented on a website to combat flash of unstyled text (FOUT). It did so in a way that could possibly have negative impacts on a visitor’s page loading experience.

I’ve been doing a few audits of late, and one thing that keeps coming up is the use of transition effects on page load (or above the fold content). This post looks at some of the performance pitfalls that can arise from this practice, as well as what you should keep in mind.

I’ve been taken aback by the reception ‘Are my third parties green?’ has received from the community. Since its launch in January the tool has expanded to now include a Directory and public API.

The web makes it possible for businesses to reach audiences well outside of their immediate geographic area. This presents its own set of challenges to ensure online content and experiences remain fast for potential customers around the world.

At Chrome Dev Summit 2021, Google introduced a couple of new potential Web Vitals metrics it’s looking into. One of these, responsiveness, has now begun appearing in the wild.

I had the pleasure of talking web sustainability with Gaël Duez for the first episode of the Green I/O podcast.

“Are my third parties green?” is an online tool that checks the sustainability of third-party requests made by any web page. This post provides some insights into how it was built, and what other features are planned.

When looking to optimise for paint metrics (First and Largest Contentful Paint for example), we’re almost certainly going to encounter render-blocking resources. In this post I’ll cover what they are, and some general tips on how to mitigate their impact on page performance.

A small life hack to help get performance tests started faster with some handy address bar shortcuts in your browser.

PageSpeed Insights is a free performance testing tool by Google. In this post we’ll cover the basics of testing a web page with PageSpeed Insights, as well as how to understand the different test results.

Solid website performance can have a lot of a positive effects from increasing revenue, to reducing stress of users. But did you know that making your site faster can also be good for the planet?

By using less power, using green power, and buying from green suppliers businesses and individuals alike can reduce their carbon footprint. How would we go about applying this same thinking to website performance and sustainability?