Lightweight personal website
Motivation
Last year I put together a personal website using a beautiful template I found online. It looked great: big images and lots of polish. I was happy with it... until I measured it's carbon footprint and saw the E rating. Oh dear I thought. I can't publicise my "passion" for sustainability on such a website now can I?
It was at the GreenIO conference in Munich that I learned about website sustainability for the first time. As well as making me aware of it, professionals showcased guidelines for improving the carbon footprint of websites. These were hundreds of pages long and I didn't think there would be an easy fix for my very dirty website...
I went looking for “sustainable” website templates. Lightweight ones. I didn’t find much that felt both simple and genuinely lightweight. They were all advertising how "cool" they looked, not how lightweight they were. In my search I came across some excellent sustainable web developers, but for a small personal site, hiring someone wasn’t realistic for me.
So I decided to build what I couldn’t find: a lightweight, sustainable personal website template that I could use myself, as well as one that others could use too.
What I aimed for
To make something that is:
- small and fast to load
- easy to understand and edit
- free to host (I’m using GitHub Pages)
- low on unnecessary dependencies
I used Web Sustainability Guidelines as well as ChatGPT to write most of the html and css. Yes, using AI has its own footprint, a large one, but my hope is that creating one reusable, lightweight template reduces the need for lots of people (including me) to rely on bulky, carbon-heavy templates, or to each build one themselves.
The idea is that this template should be self-explanatory and simple to customise: change the text, add a post, tweak the colours, and you’re done.
Reuse the template
If you’d like to use this template yourself, you can fork the repository on GitHub: github.com/ktempestuous/skeleton_personal_website .
If you use it
If you end up using the template, I’d genuinely love to hear about it. What did you build? What worked well? What was confusing?
And if you have ideas for improvements, whether it’s accessibility, performance, structure, or just nicer defaults - please let me know. I’d like this to stay lightweight, but also friendly to use and easy to maintain.