How to build a low-power website

I wish this would get more attention.

Page sizes are approaching ridiculous levels. Just 1 example:

Many news websites list a bunch of news items. You click a link, html loads. Then a bunch of style sheets. So far no problem.

Then a boatload of tracking & advertising scripts. Then a "cookies ok?" dialog. That dialog alone often causes 100s of KB's traffic. Let's say you click "manage options". More traffic. Again when you hit confirm. And of course, then a # of cookies get set anyway. Yes cookies aren't that big but it's still additional traffic.

Then some add loads. And another one. And an image used by the add is auto-refreshed. And again. And again.

All of this comes from 20, 30 or more servers, each one potentially responsible for the page 'hanging', unresponsive, content invisible or whatever, until some stuff times out (or user gives up).

Finally, you read what, 1..5 KB of text? 10+ KB (of raw text) is a big article, many news items are much shorter like 1 or 2 paragraphs.

And you see 1 or a few pictures. Which often enough, don't 'come' from the story itself but are just illustrations picked from one of those commercial tagged-and-licensed photo libraries. And you can easily reduce picture file sizes by fiddling with file format (cartoon style pix, background tiles etc) or quality settings (photos). Some websites do, many don't seem to care.

End result: multi-MB traffic just to read a few KB of text. Plus a good chunk of compute resources (and energy consumption going with that) both on server & client side.

And then companies claim they need adds to pay for hosting & related costs. Or that they have to pay their reporters. Even if they're just aggregating news from other sites (or some AI does that, as of late).

Pfff... self-inflicted unnecessary pain. Hosting bits of html/css costs nothing these days.

Reduce your fluff ratio!

Essentially any web page that does not need user interaction could be static. Use CSS to allow changes to page design. Include a header file (also static) to allow future changes to menus and functionality. No need for dynamic generation on the server, no need for JavaScript on the client.

Of course, I'm dreaming... What would life be like without JavaScript fingerprinting your browser? Dynamically selected, auto-playing videos that no one wants to see? Embedded advertising?