The internet now accounts for roughly 4% of global carbon emissions, putting it on par with the airline industry. Every page load, every image served, every container sitting idle at 3am is quietly consuming energy. Yet most developers never think about it.

This talk cuts through the sustainability buzzwords and gives you 10 practical, implementable ways to make your web applications genuinely greener. These aren’t theoretical nice-to-haves or virtue signalling exercises. They’re concrete changes that make your sites faster, cheaper and more sustainable, often simultaneously.

We’ll cover the full stack:

Front-end wins: Modern image formats that slash file sizes whilst maintaining quality. When to lazy load (and when not to). Why that auto-playing hero video is killing more than just user experience. The truth about dark mode and which devices actually benefit.

Back-end efficiency: Writing cleaner, more efficient code that uses less processing power. Minification strategies that reduce data transfer. How to audit and ruthlessly cut unnecessary third-party scripts that bloat every page load.

Infrastructure decisions: Moving to scale-to-zero containers that can reduce hosting costs and emissions by 85%. Proper CDN usage to serve content from the closest data centre rather than halfway across the planet. When static site generation makes sense (and when it doesn’t). Carbon-aware CI/CD pipelines that shift workloads to low-emission regions.

The AI question: Why AI-generated images are far more energy-intensive than most people realise, and what to use instead.

Each tip includes real-world examples, measurable impact, and honest discussion of trade-offs. You’ll leave with a clear action plan for making your own applications more sustainable, whether you’re refactoring legacy systems or building something new from scratch.

This isn’t about perfection. It’s about progress. Small changes at scale make a massive difference.

Imran is an experienced head of development who’s passionate about sustainability & staying on top of new tech to build more optimized apps

He has spoken at events all over the world to help