In the modern world, with the development of the Internet of Things and the maximum penetration of gadgets among the world's population, the issue of energy efficiency is quite acute, as humanity regularly increases its electricity consumption. In view of this, saving even 1 character or byte of text can save megawatts of energy on a global scale.
Humanity has repeatedly tried to solve this issue by implementing various solutions and rules
1. Introduction of UTF-8 (1993-1996)
Previously, texts were transmitted in different encodings (ASCII, ISO 8859-1), which took up more space and complicated data exchange. The transition to UTF-8, which uses variable character lengths (1-4 bytes), helped reduce redundant characters and make the Internet more efficient.
2. URL optimization (RFC 3986, 2005)
Standardizing shorter URLs and making them easier to write, for example:
Using relative URLs instead of long absolute URLs.
Avoiding unnecessary parameters in queries.
3. Implementation of data compression (Gzip, Brotli, 1999-2015)
HTTP request compression saves traffic by reducing the length of transmitted data. This has significantly improved the speed of web pages.
4. Limits on the length of tweets (Twitter, 2006, 2017)
Twitter introduced a 140-character limit, which forced users to express themselves clearly and to the point, avoiding the use of a large number of characters.
From this point of view, the use of short links can also have an impact on energy savings and, as a result, on the environment.
For example, the link https://www.example.com/articles/2025/february/06/how-to-optimize-url-for-better-performance takes 97 bytes and its short counterpart surl.li/aaa - only 27
When it comes to broadcasting the original link to a large number of subscribers on YouTube or in a messenger, the numbers can be really impressive. If you save 70 bytes per link, you will save 70 MB per 1 million users. Given that billions of links are created and distributed around the world every day, the savings can be significant.
On the contrary, it can be noted that the use of short links has a downside: when clicking on a short link, a separate server first processes the request and performs a redirect, and only then does the final server process the client's path. Thus, in the process of clicking on short links, an additional link appears that consumes resources and energy.
It is difficult to make an accurate calculation, so we recommend using short links when you need them, because it is really convenient.