Internet ZER0 helps raising awareness on Internet environmental footprint and offers practical solutions.
This analysis is free, automatic and helps you quickly identify websites and online services to review in priority. This does not exempt you from the additional analysis of an expert to have a complete and reliable operational report.
You enter an URL in our tool, which then calculates performance and environmental footprint of the tested webpage.
Several criteria are taken into account by our calculation method:
This tool was designed to compare URL of the same type, for example: comparing the “article page” of several news websites, or homepages of different institutional websites. Our calculation engine is not able to automatically detect the type of page or URL analyzed. Some types of websites usually tend to have higher impact than others. Therefore, we must compare what is comparable, for example: it would make no sense to put Amazon’s homepage side-by-side with an article page published on the New York Times website.
Each criteria described above (DOM complexity, data size and HTTP requests number) was chosen to represent each third of a digital service architecture:
These three criteria are injected into our algorithm to calculate the Internet ZER0 of the tested page. We associate them via a weighted average of:
Various micro and macro analyzes underline the overriding importance of the “Internet user” regarding environmental impacts, especially during the manufacture of connected devices. This is why the “DOM complexity” criteria is “overweighted” compared to the others.
In order to consider the disparity in these 3 indicators measure, we place the value observed for each criterion in a quantile, taking into account its proximity to lower/upper limits of the quantile. Limits of Internet ZER0 scale (0 to 100) were determined and validated analyzing The HTTP Archive database (500,000 URLs).
Once we get the index, we rank this value in relation to other values available in our database. We then obtain a rank. Ranks are dispatched on a scale from A to G (European standard). So you are given a second information: the URL performance compared to other URLs tested. Therefore, it’s a performance relative to the sample studied.
The webstite’s physical footprint is characterized, notably, by the amount of Random Access Memory (RAM) and the number of processor (CPU) cycles consumed by the process of the browser displaying the analysed URL. Analysing physical footprint over time - evolution of RAM consumption and CPU load - allows us to identify correlations and treshold effects: CPU blocking, RAM overconsumption…
A webpage environmental footprint is depicted by its equivalence in terms of greenhouse gases emissions and water consumption for a given number of visitors. It is calculated according to the website’s ecodesign level. We start from an average impact in terms of GHG emissions and fresh water consumption, stemming from several models carried out by GreenIT.fr: this average impact is 2g CO2e and 3cl blue water per webpage. Calculation of this value is based on the results of a LCA (Life Cycle Analysis), from end-to-end (from terminal to server), accounting for the complete life cycle (manufacture and usage) of a webpage (processing, transporting and displaying). This average value is nuanced according to the tested webpage ecodesign level, meaning that, depending on the Internet ZER0 score obtained, we overvalue or undervalue the average value. These results have been verified by third parties and are consistent with results obtained by other independent models. In this first version, the analysis is based on an ADSL connection from a landline.
The website uses our API to run page analyses.
When an analysis is launched, the requested page is loaded in a real Chrome browser and play the following scenario:
no-sandbox
, disable-dev-shm-usage
options and goog:loggingPrefs
capabilities at {"performance": "ALL"}
If the page is indeed an html page (content type text/html
) which does not encounter an error (HTTP code 200), then we proceed to analyze the metrics of the session:
Network.loadingFinished
type logs indicates the number of requests made to external resourcesencodedDataLength
of these same requests + size of the html of the page itself allows to calculate the weight of the pagesvg
elements tells us the number of DOM elements of the pageIn some cases, the analyzes can fall into error. Here are some possible explanations:
We does not provide any information on the efforts made in terms of eco-design. Like radar, which measures instantaneous speed, Internet ZER0 measures instantaneous environmental performance. Further analysis is required to assess the maturity/level of eco-design of the URL studied. The figures provided are orders of magnitude. They tell you whether your site is efficient or not, and whether its environmental footprint is low or high. Generally speaking, an in-depth analysis of your site’s performance and environmental footprint requires the intervention of an expert. This version of Internet ZER0 is imperfect. We are aware of this. We’re already working on the next version. Help us improve this service by contributing to it!