How to make your website more sustainable
Why you need a green website
You try your best to live a sustainable lifestyle and reduce your carbon footprint. You recycle and reuse, you’ve ditched single-use plastic and fast fashion. You run an ethical business or side hustle. But did you know, that your website could be undoing your conscious choices.
The internet comes at a cost. Despite being digital, it amounts to over 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gasses a year. The communications industry is on track to use 20% of the world’s electricity by 2025.
The good news is, there are steps you can take to make greener design choices.
5 simple steps to make your website greener
There are lots of steps you can take to make your website sustainable, you can even buy books about it. But to help get you on track quickly, here are 5 simple steps you can take today to make your website greener.
1. Check your website's carbon footprint
Use Website Carbon Calculator to check how sustainable your website is. The checker will let you know:
- how clean your website is compared to other sites
- how much CO2 is produced every time someone visits your website
- if your website is running on sustainable energy
- how much CO2 your website is estimated to produce each year
- how to take action, like switching to green hosting or how many trees you can plant to offset your carbon footprint.
2. Find out if your website is hosted on green energy
The second thing you can do is check how your website is hosted. The Green Web Foundation will tell you if your website is hosted on green energy. If it’s not, you can find a green hosting provider on the green web directory.
This website is hosted by one.com and is on the green web directory. If you’re looking for a green hosting provider here’s £5 off your first order.
3. Improve your user experience (UX)
Make it easy for people to use your website. Help them find what they need or to complete the actions they want easily. This will reduce the amount of energy wasted needlessly navigating trying to figure out what to do next. And will make the experience on your website more enjoyable, which is likely to turn that person into a returning customer or client.
4. Check your content
Complete a content audit on your website and ditch any unnecessary content. Web pages use energy, so ask yourself do you really need this content? Is it adding value to your business or to your audience? If the answer’s no, then strip it out. It’s good practice to keep your content is fresh and relevant. This will also help your search rankings.
5. Reduce images and videos
It’s very tempting to upload that beautiful photo you took of the sunrise, but before you do ask yourself a few questions.
- Does the image add value to the person visiting your site?
- Does it help communicate your message or story?
- Is it useful information
- Can you make the image smaller?
- Can you delete images that the user won’t see?
Types of images you may need on your website:
- a header image
- photos of you or your products
- background images.
Check the sizes of any images you do use. If it’s a large file then use a photo editor to reduce the size. You can reduce image sizes simply using Canva.
If you need videos then host them on a third party sites such as YouTube or Vimeo. As well as using energy, videos hosted on your website will slow down your website performance. Which will make it much longer to load, and you’re likely to lose customers as no one has time for that.
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I hope this content helped you along your journey. If you’d like more where this came from, check out my blog or sign up for my newsletter.
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