projects / green-website-investigation
Green Website Investigation
Final-year research at London Metropolitan University on sustainable website design: an optimised London Library prototype, measured against the original, and published at IEEE SNAMS.
- Problem
- The dissertation asked how websites could be designed and developed more sustainably, and produced a framework for that work. The recorded title is Investigating Green Website Design: Developing a Carbon-Neutral Website for the Digital Future Through Optimised Web Solutions.
- Engineering approach
- Built an optimised clone of The London Library for desktop and laptop use, then compared it with the original using performance measurements and carbon calculators. React and Vite on the frontend, hosted on Cloudflare Pages. Spring Boot 3.4.2 and Java 21 on the backend.
- Technologies
- React
- JavaScript
- Vite
- HTML/CSS
- Java 21
- Spring Boot 3.4
- Maven
- Cloudflare Pages
- Git/GitHub
- Lighthouse
- Verified results
- On the 19 April 2025 comparison, page weight fell from 102–107 MB to 255–302 KB, HTTP requests from 120 to 14, and DOM nodes from 669 to 95. Lighthouse performance went from 74 to 100. Carbon calculators estimated about 99.7–99.8% lower emissions. Those are calculator estimates for that comparison.
- Status
- Presented at SNAMS 2025 in Vienna. IEEE publication followed in 2026; the exact month is unverified. Cited in an ECSA 2026 Springer chapter and by Stanford researchers at IMC 2026. Live prototype and repository are public.
Research
Final-year project at London Metropolitan University. It investigated how websites could be designed and developed more sustainably, and produced a framework for sustainable website design and development.
The build was an optimised clone of The London Library website, compared with the original using environmental estimates and web performance measurements. The original scope focused on desktop and laptop use.
The wider framework also covered renewable-energy hosting, lightweight technologies, maintainable code, and guidance for developers.
Technology stack
React and Vite on the frontend, Spring Boot 3.4.2 with Java 21 on the backend. The frontend is hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The repository has separate frontend/ and backend/ directories, plus README.md.
The records do not establish a database, specific API endpoints, backend production hosting, the exact React version, an automated test framework, or Docker.
| Area | Recorded detail |
|---|---|
| Frontend | React, JavaScript, JSX, HTML, and CSS. Packages are managed with npm. |
| Build tooling | Vite. The setup used create-vite@6.2.0 as the scaffolding package. The installed Vite version was not recorded on its own. Commands used were vite, vite build, and vite preview. |
| Backend | Spring Boot 3.4.2, built with Maven. |
| Java | Runtime Java 21.0.5. One Maven build set the compiler release to 17. |
| Server | Embedded Tomcat, running locally on port 8080. |
| Deployment | Cloudflare Pages for the frontend. Wrangler is a development dependency. |
| Version control | Git and GitHub. Repository tiberiuungurianu/final-project-green-website-investigation. Prototype at greenprototypeforinvestigation.uk. |
| Navigation | Component state, including setSelectedPage. React Router was not confirmed in the records. |
Optimisations
The prototype kept the purpose of The London Library site and used a minimalist interface.
- Images. Compressed images, and converted JPG and PNG assets to WebP.
- Loading. Lazy-loaded images and content. Videos loaded only after a button press.
- Page structure. Reduced page weight, HTTP requests, and DOM complexity.
- Code. Removed unused code and minimised HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Cut unnecessary dependencies and third-party resources.
- Caching. Improved caching.
Measured comparison
Figures from the comparison shared on 19 April 2025. The first four carbon comparisons are about 99.7–99.8% lower estimated emissions. They come from carbon calculators.
Evaluation tools were Lighthouse, Website Carbon Calculator, Beacon, Siti Green, Ecograder, and EcoIndex. Lighthouse-result PDFs supported the comparison table in the research paper.
| Metric | Original website | Optimised prototype |
|---|---|---|
| Page weight | 102–107 MB | 255–302 KB |
| HTTP requests | 120 | 14 |
| DOM nodes | 669 | 95 |
| Lighthouse performance | 74 | 100 |
| First Contentful Paint | 0.9 s | 0.4 s |
| Largest Contentful Paint | 2.7 s | 0.8 s |
| Website Carbon estimate | 21.93 g | 0.06 g |
| Beacon carbon estimate | 32.603 g | 0.079 g |
| Siti Green carbon estimate | 25.01 g | 0.06 g |
| Ecograder carbon estimate | 30.68 g | 0.09 g |
| EcoIndex monthly CO₂e estimate | 2.34 kg | 1.26 kg |
| Associated water estimate | 35.1 litres | 18.9 litres |
Other measurement runs
Other saved results mention DOM nodes falling from 627 to 82, and Largest Contentful Paint around 0.4 seconds. Another evaluation recorded 107 DOM nodes. Those runs stay separate from the 19 April 2025 table until they are matched to the final report.
Publication
Presented at SNAMS in 2025, then published by IEEE in 2026. The recorded window is around February or March 2026. The exact date is still unverified.
- Paper. A Practical Framework for Sustainable Website Design and Development.
- Authors. Tiberiu-Septimiu Ungurianu, Sahar Al-Sudani, and Ramzi Djemai.
- Supervisor. Dr Sahar Al-Sudani.
- Conference. SNAMS 2025, Vienna, 25–28 November 2025. Submission number 6925.
- DOI.
10.1109/SNAMS67467.2025.11391157. - ECSA 2026. Cited as reference 20 in Evaluating Green API Patterns Impact Based on the Open Data Hub Request Logs, by Marcelo Nunes, João Daniel, Alessandro Aneggi, Cesare Pautasso, and Eduardo Guerra. Springer, Software Architecture (ECSA 2026). DOI
10.1007/978-3-032-39236-7_37. - Stanford. Cited by Rumaisa Habib, Balaji Balachandran, Nurullah Demir, and Zakir Durumeric (Stanford University) in “Stop Trying to Make Fetch Happen”: Towards a Modality-Aware Understanding of Unnecessary Resources on the Web. ACM Internet Measurement Conference (IMC 2026). DOI
10.1145/3777912.3839788.