Your Website Carbon Footprint

Many businesses never really think that their corporate website has a carbon footprint, but in this current age of ozone damage and everyone trying to go green, the following may be food for thought and help in a small way to reduce your own online website carbon footprint.

According to Website Carbon, an average website uses 211,000 grams of CO2 each year, what’s scarier is that streaming a video online may create 0.2 grams of CO2 per second.

With more and more websites being created each year, these figures are certainly going to increase.

Maybe now is the time to review your own web presence and help the environment.

How can I lower my Website Carbon Footprint?

It goes without saying that energy is a major factor in producing carbon, the internet is totally run on electricity which creates CO2. Carbon is generated from the use of devices that access the Internet, including the servers that host each site’s data.

How to reduce your site’s energy consumption

Always ensure you site is optimised for speed, the faster your pages load, the less data is processed by your server resulting in a lower carbon output.

Reduce the Number of Resources Used

All the resource on your site requires energy. When pages are loaded each time visitors access your website, those pages are loaded thousands of times. This includes even small image files. Try to reduce the number of files requested, this will reduce your site’s carbon footprint.

Optimise your website Images

Optimising images vastly reduces your site’s overall size, and in turn will lower the amount of data needed to serve the site. This is also a great benefit to increase your site’s speed.

Many resources are available to help reduce image sizes such as TinyPNG

Reduce the Amount of JavaScript on your website

JavaScript is present on many websites and is beneficial in many ways but does consume quite a bit of energy. Once a webpage has loaded, the page energy usage is finished. Unfortunately, if JavaScript continues running in the background, then your website will use more energy on the device used by the site visitor.

Always use a Sustainable Hosting Provider

You can reduce the electricity used by your website by ensuring you have a sustainable hosting company.
Choose a hosting company that gets electricity from sustainable (renewable) sources