Improve site speed & website carbon emissions by turning off Feefo's Media Panel

Feefo are a company that provide customer reviews. It helps all sorts of people from the other customers, to buinesses owners to make sure they are doing things right.

They have a helpful JavaScript snippet which is a nice solution to put reviews on to your WordPress website.

It's nice and simple solution that integrates well but it comes at a bit of a cost, esepcially if you have the Media Panel visible.

The Problem

The Media Panel snippet loads up all 17 images into a grid. Each grid square is 63px but the images loaded are much larger at 800px. So it's a lot of extra weight to your site (1.6 MB in total). It's great that they lazy load the snippet so it only shows when the user arrives at the locations. But it's expensive and I question the value of show them at all.

To give you an idea of this expensive snippet:

• It takes 36 seconds to load these on a 3G connection.
• Each image is on average 94.1 KB
• And takes 244.7 miliseconds per image (they load concurrently so kinda ok here on WIFI)

And the carbon emissions produced per load would be:

• That's the same as 5,700,000 farts per year
• Or like ordering 292.6 large oat milk lattes per year

To continue with this logic if 500 people had this JavaScript snippet on their site that would be:

• That's the same as 57,000,000 farts per year
• Or like ordering 146,300 large oat milk lattes per year

It really starts adding up doesn't it!

The Solution

Simply uncheck the "Show Media Panel" checkbox on the Feefo admin dashboard, wait a bit, then you're done. It will display the reviews in a list only removing the uneeded farts and media gallery from your website.

Calculations:

Here's come calculation on how I got to some of these numbers, I've used the WebsiteCarbon API to calulate the bytes to CO2 so that's how I got to the 0.95 figure for 1.6mb of images.

• Grams of CO2 per fart: tweetfarts.com
• Grams of CO2 per latte: How Bad are Bananas?: The Carbon Footprint of Everything

const SIZE_TO_CO2_GRAMS = 0.95;
const MONTHLY_VIEWS = 10000;
const GRAMS_PER_FART = 0.02; //
const GRAMS_PER_OAT_LATTE = 389.6;
let gramsPerYear = SIZE_TO_CO2_GRAMS * MONTHLY_VIEWS * 12; // 114,000g of CO2
let fartsPerYear = gramsPerYear / GRAMS_PER_FART; // 5,700,000 farts per year
let oatLattesPerYear = gramsPerYear / GRAMS_PER_OAT_LATTE; // 292.6 oat lattes per year

const ACTIVE_SNIPPETS = 500;
gramsPerYear = gramsPerYear * 500; // 57,000,000g or 57 tonnes of CO2
fartsPerYear = fartsPerYear * 500; // 2,850,000,000 farts per year
oatLattesPerYear = oatLattesPerYear * 500; // 146,300 lattes per year