Catchpoint Announces Free Carbon Footprint Measurement and Optimization for Websites

Carbon Control brings transparency to Internet-related CO² emissions, providing visibility and improvement opportunities for business and organizations committed to sustainability

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Catchpoint®, The Internet Resilience Company™, has expanded its WebPageTest Solution with a new capability that lets businesses and organizations see the real-time carbon footprint of their websites so they can take specific actions to reduce Internet-related CO² emissions. Access to Carbon Control is free. Carbon Control is available through Catchpoint's WebPageTest , the gold standard for website performance testing. Under the European climate law, EU countries must cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55% by 2030. Their goal is to make the EU climate neutral by 2050 and Carbon Control is being released to help organizations achieve this target. Using data from multiple sources, including the Green Web Foundation’s Greencheck, Carbon Control provides users with an estimated carbon footprint, including page weight, in grams of carbon per minute and CO² per new visit. Experts estimate¹ that Information Communication Technology (ICT), including websites, could represent as much as 2.1% to 3.9% greenhouse emissions.

“Sustainability is becoming a higher priority for organizations globally. Not only is it our ethical responsibility, but there are new regulations that will require companies to monitor and manage their environmental reporting,” said Adrian Cockcroft, tech advisor and sustainability advocate. “Carbon Control is making it easy to take the first step by measuring the carbon footprint of a website or web application while also providing actionable recommendations on actions that could result in improvements.”

While measuring one’s carbon footprint is complex and involves many variables, especially with dynamically provisioned applications across data centers. WebPageTest allows running multiple tests to understand the footprint from different locations and the difference between first load and subsequent loads. It also provides a comparison with the benchmark and specific actions that might help reduce the carbon footprint, from switching to a greener hosting provider to image compression. Pro users can also use Carbon Control to run no-code experiments (based on the recommendations) on live sites, to assess the impact those changes will have before taking action.

“Enterprises of all sizes are seeking ways to reduce their carbon footprints, making it part of their missions as well as formalizing reduction goals that align with the U.N.’s Global Roadmap and other climate initiatives,” said Mehdi Daoudi, Chief Executive Officer, and co-founder of Catchpoint. “The always-on and expanding Internet we all want has today a massive carbon footprint. Monitoring environmental impact and understanding ways to reduce it, is part of our responsibility to society as a whole and to future generations.”

Catchpoint plans to add WebPageTest and the new Carbon Control capability to the Catchpoint Internet Performance Monitoring (IPM) Platform, expanding the Web Experience solution and complementing its Customer, Application, Network and Workforce Experience solutions. The new Carbon Control capability will enable customers to do more advanced tests such as understanding the carbon footprint of a scripted website transaction (browsing, shopping cart and payment, for example) and continuous proactive testing.

For more information about Carbon Control, or to run a test on any website to see their carbon footprint, visit https://www.webpagetest.org/

To help grow the awareness of the importance of managing website carbon footprints, Catchpoint is offering companies a badge to be added to websites, which can be obtained with their carbon control test results.

About Catchpoint: Catchpoint is the Internet Resilience Company ^TM. The top online retailers, Global2000, CDNs, cloud service providers, and xSPs in the world rely on Catchpoint to increase their resilience by catching any issues in the Internet Stack before they impact their business. The Catchpoint platform offers synthetics, RUM, performance optimization, high fidelity data and flexible visualizations with advanced analytics. It leverages thousands of global vantage points (including inside wireless networks, BGP, backbone, last mile, endpoint, enterprise, ISPs and more) to provide unparalleled observability into anything that impacts your customers, workforce, networks, website performance, applications, and APIs.