www.theguardian.com/europe

The numbers

First visit

0.233 g CO₂e

Return visit

0.0033 g CO₂e

Hosting

unknown

LCP

360 ms

CLS

0.001

TTFB

47 ms

At 10,000 views a month this page emits about 21.0 kg CO₂e a year, roughly 86 km in an average petrol car. The estimate assumes 75% new and 25% returning visitors, a measured cache reload ratio of 1%, and world-average grid intensity. How we calculate this

1. Audit third-party servicessave ~0.069 g/visit (614 kB)High impact · moderate effort

   5 third-party domains account for 1.23 MB (78% of the page).

   Remove services that no longer earn their place; load the rest on interaction (facades for embeds, delayed consent-gated tags). Each third party is also a privacy and performance dependency.

   • assets.guim.co.uk618 kB
   • i.guim.co.uk413 kB
   • interactive.guim.co.uk166 kB
   • media.guim.co.uk30 kB
   • 0 B

   WSG 3.5: Treat third parties the same as first parties
2. Reduce JavaScript payloadsave ~0.015 g/visit (138 kB)Medium impact · moderate effort

   47 scripts total 553 kB on the wire (2.16 MB decoded). Bundles this size usually carry a lot of unused code.

   Split bundles per route, tree-shake dependencies, and audit with a bundle analyzer or coverage profile. A 25% cut is a conservative target for bundles this size.

   • Notice.97af9.js95 kB
   • polyfill.min.js64 kB
   • index.client.web.e09f89c26980a44a8ee6.js48 kB
   • 9468.client.web.934edc10e2375f7184f5.js46 kB
   • wrapperMessagingWithoutDetection.js43 kB

   WSG 3.2: Minify and remove unused codeWSG 3.3: Modularize bandwidth-heavy components
3. Verify your hosting energyMedium impact · moderate effort

   This host has not published renewable energy evidence with the Green Web Foundation, so its energy source is unknown.

   Choose a provider listed in the Green Web Directory, or ask your current provider to publish evidence (and a carbon.txt). This cuts the data-center share of every single page view.

   • carbon.txtNo carbon.txt found at the site root; publishing one is the lightest first step.

   WSG 4.1: Use sustainable hosting
4. Collapse the redirect chainMedium impact · quick fix

   The address that was scanned goes through 2 redirects before the document is served, ending at https://www.theguardian.com/europe. Every hop is a full round trip on a connection that has not warmed up yet.

   Point links, sitemaps and canonical tags at the final address, and make the host redirect in one hop rather than chaining http to https to www.

   • https://theguardian.com/redirects to https://www.theguardian.com/europe

   WSG 4.4: Setup necessary error pages and redirection links
5. Optimize web fontssave ~0.0098 g/visit (88 kB)Advisory · quick fix

   10 font files total 251 kB.

   Subset fonts to used glyphs, prefer one variable font over multiple weights, serve WOFF2 only, and consider system fonts for UI text.

   • GuardianTextSansWeb-Bold.woff240 kB
   • GuardianTextEgyptianWeb-Bold.woff237 kB
   • GuardianTextSansWeb-Regular.woff236 kB
   • GuardianTextEgyptianWeb-Regular.woff236 kB
   • GuardianTextSans-Bold.woff218 kB

   WSG 2.11: Use optimized web typography
6. Upgrade compression beyond gzipsave ~0.0057 g/visit (51 kB)Advisory · quick fix

   341 kB of text ships gzip-compressed; Brotli or Zstandard would cut roughly another 15-20%, and browsers without them fall back to gzip automatically.

   Serve precompressed Brotli for static text assets (highest level, compressed at build time) and enable Brotli or zstd for dynamic responses; keep gzip only as the fallback.

   • theguardian.com140 kB
   • Notice.97af9.js95 kB
   • wrapperMessagingWithoutDetection.js43 kB
   • gdpr-tcf.27718c8cb9d29947d2c1.bundle.js31 kB
   • messages17 kB

   WSG 4.3: Reduce data transfer with compression
7. Stop downloading the same asset twicesave ~0.0042 g/visit (38 kB)Advisory · quick fix

   4 assets were fetched more than once in a single page load (151 kB of repeated transfer).

   Usually a script injected twice or cache-busting query strings that differ per reference. Load each asset once and let the HTTP cache do its job.

   • polyfill.min.js2 downloads · 129 kB
   • frameworks.client.web.6b19980dfdb962b2f0d0.js2 downloads · 41 kB
   • index.client.web.e09f89c26980a44a8ee6.js2 downloads · 96 kB
   • graun.standalone.commercial.js2 downloads · 36 kB

   WSG 3.2: Minify and remove unused code
8. Simplify the document structureAdvisory · larger effort

   The page renders 4642 DOM elements, above the 1,500 guideline. Large trees cost memory and CPU on every visitor's device.

   Flatten wrapper markup, render long lists virtually or paginate, and prefer semantic elements over nested divs.

   WSG 3.6: Ensure code follows good semantic practices

Where the bytes are

• JavaScript553 kB · 47 req
• Images443 kB · 32 req
• Fonts251 kB · 10 req
• Other151 kB · 5 req
• HTML142 kB · 2 req
• Data (XHR)19 kB · 3 req
• CSS7.6 kB · 2 req
• Data (fetch)2.2 kB · 12 req