Scoring
Nine grades, from Boomtown to Monster. A+ to F are the Sustainable Web Design rating, the same letters the Website Carbon Calculator uses. We added G and H because some websites are far heavier than the standard was ever built for.
- A+Boomtown.Typical page view up to 0.27 MB
- AChoice.Typical page view up to 0.53 MB
- BYeah.Typical page view up to 0.98 MB
- CYeah nah.Typical page view up to 1.41 MB
- DChunky.Typical page view up to 1.88 MB
- EHefty.Typical page view up to 2.42 MB
- FPretty massive.Typical page view up to 5.00 MB
- GAbsolute unit.Typical page view up to 20.00 MB
- HMonster.Typical page view above 20.00 MB
Bars on a stretched scale, so every grade shows.
Where the lines come from.
A+ to E are the Sustainable Web Design digital carbon rating, version 4: the 5th to 50th percentiles of homepage weights in the HTTP Archive’s June 2023 crawl, used exactly. F starts at the standard’s F, above 2.42 MB, the weight of the middle homepage in 2023. The standard stops there, so we added two grades to tell heavy pages from very heavy ones: G above 5 MB and H above 20 MB. The lines are fixed. If the standard changes, we will say so.
“Yeah nah is how Kiwis say no, gently. The grade is not a judgement. It is a starting point.”
The biggest movers are almost always the same: oversized images, autoplaying video, chat and social add-ons, and too many web fonts. Most are quick to fix and change nothing about how a page looks. Visitors only notice that it loads sooner.
- Why grade weight, not carbon?
- Weight is something we can measure exactly: every file a page downloads. Carbon has to be modelled, from the weight and assumptions about electricity, devices and data centres. So we grade what we measured, and show the carbon as a guide.
- Why does YeahNah’s grade differ from other calculators’?
- The Website Carbon Calculator assumes some visitors return with files already saved, and gives a discount for green hosting. We measure returning visits instead of assuming them, grade weight alone, and score every page we measure on a phone and a laptop. So our grade can be a step stricter.
- Can I improve my grade?
- Yes. Your profile lists the changes that would save the most. Make them, and next month’s measurement shows the difference. Your profile keeps every month, so the improvement is there for anyone to see.
- Is a light website hard to build?
- No. A light website looks and works the same as a heavy one: the same pages and pictures, sized and compressed properly. Most ways to cut emissions ask people to change how they live. This one asks a web team to do its job well.