What is it about?

This study examines how much energy websites consume on users' devices while they are being viewed in a web browser. We measured the energy consumption of 100 popular websites from five countries across four industries and investigated how common browsing behaviors—such as using browser caching, accepting or rejecting cookies, and scrolling down a page—affect energy use. We also explored whether larger websites necessarily consume more energy.

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Why is it important?

As more people spend increasing amounts of time online, improving the energy efficiency of websites can help reduce the environmental impact of digital technologies. Our findings show that simple measures, such as effective browser caching and reducing unnecessary third-party content, can significantly lower energy consumption. We also found that website size alone is not a reliable indicator of energy use, suggesting that developers need better ways to measure and optimize software. These results provide practical guidance for building more energy-efficient websites and support the development of sustainable software engineering practices.

Perspectives

For me, this publication represents an important step toward making software sustainability a measurable engineering discipline. We have long optimized software for performance, reliability, and security, but energy efficiency has rarely been treated as a first-class quality attribute. I hope this research encourages developers, researchers, and organizations to start measuring software energy consumption systematically and to make energy efficiency an integral part of software design and development. As the environmental impact of digital technologies continues to grow, I believe sustainable software engineering will become an essential part of our profession.

Janne Kalliola
Aalto-yliopisto

Big rivers are formed out of small streams. The same goes for energy consumption as a few milliwatts here and a few milliwatts there add up over scale. I think this study is valuable in that regard that it shows how small choices can have a big impact within the context of web applications. Considering how prevalent the usage of the web is these days, I believe the topic deserves more attention and hopefully our work can invite more research in the space.

Juho Vepsäläinen
Aalto-yliopisto

Read the Original

This page is a summary of: Evaluating Front-end Web Energy Consumption: Quantifying the Role of Caching, Cookies, Scrolling Behavior, and Data Volume, ACM Transactions on the Web, July 2026, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3836737.
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