How does something as immaterial as a website even leave a (carbon) footprint? The answer is backstage: it comes down to the electrical energy consumed by the very material devices that host and process all the data, and the heat and by-emissions released. Here’s how to help from your end.
Use green hosting
This is the first and most obvious step. Considering the literal millions of data centers operating around the world, you can imagine how resource-intensive it is to keep the coolers running 24/7 in all those warehouses every single day of the year for the whole of the internet.
A green web host is a company that offers hosting services tailored to reduce the carbon emissions of their business via various channels. In most cases, this usually means relying on renewable energy sources or other green solutions to optimize the massive amount of electricity consumed by the servers. Take the time to research the hosts that catch your interest.
It can be challenging to find someone who combines strong performance, solid customer support, and a genuine commitment to environmentally friendly practices. As a starting point, look for someone who runs their own data centers – that way they have direct control over how the servers are actually run.
At the very least, look for a host that maintains carbon neutrality – someone who matches 100% of the energy servers consume with renewable energy from other avenues to balance their scale.
Greenify your web design practices
We all know that good web design is essential for successful business these days, but the idea of “good” has changed with the rise of eco-consciousness. Forget about massive high-dimension visuals and instantly displaying every single piece of media. These are some of the most detrimental contributors to loading time and overall energy consumption.
Reduce the resolution as much as possible without completely messing up the image quality, and focus on pictures that serve a practical purpose rather than just adding aesthetic points. Also, transition to “lazy loading”: loading an image or other media only as a user scrolls down, instead of all at once.
Videos are more challenging, but you can somewhat reduce their negative impact by only using them as needed. This also makes them more effective, by the way, since you avoid overwhelming people’s attention span. Embed videos whenever you can, and definitely disable any autoplay.
Optimize your content
In addition to reducing the load of your visual elements, you can polish your textual and other content to mitigate the negative environmental effects of your pages. Believe it or not, adhering to the best practices in web content optimization can have quite an impact on your site’s footprint.
Every once in a while, delete old posts, unused media, outdated categories and tags, modules and plugins you’ve moved on from, broken links, spam comments, etc. Streamline the layout to reduce the time (and energy) it takes to navigate the site. Use light themes and build a minimalist, intuitive interface.
Optimize your data processing
One great way to make your site more eco-friendly, while also boosting the user experience, is by making it faster. Just imagine all the resources burned and all the harmful by-products released while your servers are desperately struggling behind the scenes, trying to process vast amounts of data, forcing visitors to wait in frustration for the website to work. Take the burden off by reducing the amount of energy needed to load everything.
See if you can combine some of the code to minimize it. Commit to accelerated mobile pages (AMPs) and other energy-efficiency best practices for websites, and also consider CSS sprites, Gzip compression, or a CDN. Don’t forget the power of caching: take some time to implement it at all levels – database, server, browser, page. Whatever it takes to get the processing done faster and at less energy costs.
Invest in carbon emissions offsetting
Coming back full circle, it can be pretty hard to find a web host that’s truly entirely green. There’s a significant bottleneck to how fast renewable energy can get up to gear, even though it’s becoming more and more mainstream. That’s why, as a way to reduce the unavoidable carbon load of your host, you might want to minimize it in other places. Invest in projects that strive to remove, or at least reduce, other sources of emissions.
You can choose to invest in some off-web environmental effort or look for projects specifically dedicated to cutting website emissions that you can join. One well-known example is The CO2 Neutral Initiative.
They monitor a website’s annual number of visitors and use that to calculate its carbon footprint, then invest in various projects that help offset it. When a website succeeds in offsetting its footprint, the initiative provides it with a certificate as proof.
To sum up, your part in making the online world more sustainable is to minimize the amount of energy your site requires from servers and users alike. Sign up with a green host if you can, and explore connected third-party projects you can invest in to offset emissions in general.
Optimize your content and attendant aesthetics to reduce loading time, and do everything you can to streamline your data processing. Keep everything intuitive and efficient: the easier your site is to use, the less fuel it’ll burn, and the smaller footprint it’ll leave.
