The Confluence of Social Justice and the Digital Size of Our Websites

While you may not have heard much about this topic yet, we’ve been looking into it, and we think it’s an important area of consideration for digital publishers and owners of websites, especially those organizations that serve low-income populations.

In 2024 15% of adults in the USA were smartphone dependent and didn’t subscribe to a broadband service. The majority of them live in households that survive on incomes at or below the poverty line.

Low-income smartphone users are more likely to have restrictive bandwidth/data plans that limit the amount of Internet data they have access to, and they spend a disproportionate amount of their income to access that limited data.

Organizations with websites designed and built using methods that have a larger digital footprint may inadvertently consume more of a low-income individual’s limited resources. Sadly, sometimes these organizations turn out to be the very ones working with low-income populations. It doesn’t have to be this way.

At NetRaising, we consider the measurement of a webpage’s digital size/weight to be a key indicator of its future social success. A recent example would be website we launched for Lower Columbia Fish Recovery Board with an image-rich home page that is less than a third the size of an average Wordpress website page.

Ask us about free tools you can use to measure the size of your current website and to learn more about the confluence of social justice and the digital size of websites.