5.27 Define Performance and Environmental Budgets

Setting targets and limits regarding your product or service is important for keeping a sustainable mindset. Using budgets, you can declare the remits of which you will work within to ensure your emissions do not fall outside (and monitor your progress through development).

Criteria

Environmental Budget: The product team has defined, baselined, and documented clear sustainability and environmental budget criteria that cover the page, user-journey, and digital service levels and metrics (such as a CO2.js score) that are approved by relevant product stakeholders.
Performance Budget: Tools such as a performance budget exist to determine the maximum size (goals) your app or website can weigh to reduce the data transfer and HTTP request impact (using metrics like Google Lighthouse).
Human Budget: KPIs are defined around engineering hours, development time, or sprints keeping the health and wellbeing of your workers paramount. Consideration has been taken around optimizing your workflow sustainably to allow all tasks to be performed with care.
Measurable Improvements: The product team can measurably show how much the budgeting process improved performance and reduced emissions.
Capacity And Maintenance: The product team invests in resources to build capacity and maintain the budgets over time.

Impact

Medium

Effort

Medium

Benefits

Environmental:
A strict sustainability or performance budget will reduce the chance of your website getting too large (and causing pollution transfers), which in turn will ensure it has a minimal impact on a visitor’s device. This will have a direct impact on emissions reduction by forcing businesses to choose where to make reductions and efficiency savings.
Performance:
Keeping realistic goals regarding delivery size will push developers to optimize resource-heavy projects and reconsider using large tooling in place of lightweight alternatives. Moreover, A lower set target budget for a product or service will decrease the amount of time a browser spends transferring and rendering data.
Economic:
Customers will not have to keep upgrading devices to match the needs of a website that grows (unchecked) over time.
Conversion:
Reduced churn and page abandonment will occur due to the application or website becoming more performant. Potentially, your search engine ranking may perform better due to performance being a key indicator in PageRank algorithms.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Medium
water: Medium
emissions: Medium

Example

Code:

[
{
	"resourceSizes": [],
	"timings": [
	{
		"metric": "largest-contentful-paint",
		"budget": 2500
	},
	{
		"metric": "max-potential-fid",
		"budget": 100
	},
	{
		"metric": "cumulative-layout-shift",
		"budget": 0.1
	}
	]
}
]

Performance Budget.

Resources

View the Guideline