WordPress Tips

Your website has a carbon footprint. In the early days of the internet, no one really thought about this. Now, we are all looking for ways to reduce our impact on the environment. With this in mind, it is possible to reduce your website’s carbon footprint while improving user experience, boosting performance, and enhancing SEO.

The average website uses 211,000g of CO2 annually. Over the next 4 years, the tech industry may consume nearly 20% of total electricity generated worldwide and create 5.5% of global CO2 emissions.

Improvements in Web Design Make a Difference

However, small improvements in web design can make a large difference in CO2 output. Here are 3 changes to discuss with your web developer.

Web Design to Reduce Energy Consumption

The internet generates about the same amount of CO2 as many major countries through its use of electricity. The carbon comes from 2 sources: the devices we use and the servers that host the data.

Computers heat up, and when they heat up, they slow down. Servers are especially vulnerable and use extraordinary amounts of energy to keep cool and functional. This is precisely why Microsoft experimented with creating an undersea server farm. Follow these tips:

1. Make your website faster. The faster your site, the less data is used to serve it, and the less carbon it’s putting out.
2. Reduce the number of resources used. Everything that loads on your site has an impact. Even a tiny PNG file can create an impact if it’s loaded thousands or millions of times. Anything you can do to reduce the number of actual files requested will reduce your carbon output.
3. Optimize images. Optimizing images is an excellent way to reduce your website’s carbon footprint. Nothing reduces a site’s footprint like optimizing images. It’s easy and free to reduce the size of JPGs and PNGs with a service like TinyPNG.
4. Lazy Load Images. Lazy loading images loads them only when required. Images at the top of the page load, but images further down will load only as the user scrolls down. That saves on CO2.
5. Select a Sustainable Hosting Company. You can’t fully eliminate your website’s need for power. However, you can look for a hosting company that obtains its electricity from sustainable sources. Just be sure they have a backup plan.

Help Your Visitors Make Good Choices

We all like making good choices. We choose to eat healthier food, recycle when we can, and travel by bike rather than car when possible.

Improve navigation. If your content is accessible, there will be fewer page loads, which consumes fewer resources. Improve your information architecture to improve search accuracy, bread crumbs, and link text. All this helps your visitors find content faster.

Be Inclusive and Support Legacy Devices

One paradox about electric vehicles is that we replace older gas-guzzling cars to purchase them. A new EV is greener, but many drivers then increase their usage because they think they are driving cleaner. But, they forget that a new EV must be manufactured, minerals for batteries must be mined, and then parts must be shipped and assembled. So in certain circumstances, an EV is not greener than a vintage automobile.

This conundrum applies to our electronic devices as well. Each time we rush to buy the latest gadget, we discard the older generations. A device can and should last longer than two years.

This is not to say that you shouldn’t embrace modern web standards. Technologies like CSS Grid are excellent at reducing markup size and speeding up sites. CSS Grid has been well supported for over four years, and even “legacy” devices can handle it. If you can keep a phone for an extra six months, the environmental cost of that phone is reduced by 20%.

Sustainable Web Design is Good for the Environment and Your Business

The fundamental elements of good web design are the fundamental elements of sustainable web design. Make your site fast and usable, and you’ll end up with a more energy-efficient site. Make it transparent, and you’ll help your users make good choices of their own. All of these things are not only good for the environment, but they also result in improved UX and SEO.