low–tech websites

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why low-tech?

While the internet may seem weightless, every website we visit carries a carbon footprint. From the energy powering servers and data centers to the electricity consumed by our devices, our digital interactions contribute to global carbon emissions. At the heart of low-carbon web design lies the principle of efficiency. This means minimizing data loading requirements and eliminating unnecessary elements. A low-tech site is sustainable because the site minimises its environmental footprint and is designed to last as long as possible with little maintenance.

Portrait or visual

where do we draw the line?

The Low-tech Magazine is a great example of an environmentally friendly website as it is solar powered. Aside from the environmental aspect though, most low-tech websites are built on rather simple code. However this can vary. Some are built only of text while others have images, gifs or even videos. When does a website then cross over from being low-tech into being high-tech? Does that not also imply the existence of mid-tech somewhere there between?

It seems that the idea of low-tech websites is quite broad. It is mostly built on the idea that normal people like you and me can code their own website. Therefore how complicated the websites are depend on the skillset of the person coding it.

GeoCities also used to be huge for the low-tech web. It was a web hosting service that allowed users to create and publish websites free of charge, and to browse user-created websites by their theme or interest, active from 1994 to 2009. It was a place where low-tech websites flourished.

In recent years there was a webring that collected links to low-tech websites . The webring was retired in 2025, however the site is still up and is the perfect example of how different the low-tech web can be. The webring creator had this to say about low-tech websites:

It’s clear that it’s something intrinsic to web designers, this desire to build better things, because it’s not just that the typical website uses a lot of energy, it’s also just a horrible thing. It’s not fun to be on the internet anymore, at least not like it used to be, in the sense that these days, you open a website, you get a cookie warning, then you get some privacy thing that you have to click away, then you get the newsletter, then you get the ads in your face, and then by the time you get to the content, you have already lost your interest.

Maybe we should not only focus on the energy use but also simply on creating a website that shows what I want to read and that loads fast and that doesn’t bother me with all these questions.







Björk Magnúsdóttir – Stafrænar aðferðir LHÍ 2026