How to cut the carbon emissions of your website

23 March 2023

I recently wrote an article for BBC News Online about how websites can reduce their carbon footprint.

You may not have considered it before, but every web visit results in pollution. It uses energy on your device, in the network and on the server. A visit to my homepage, for example, produces 0.17g of CO2, which is better than 83% of websites tested by the Website Carbon Calculator. If I had 10,000 visitors per month, though, that would be the same amount of carbon that a tree absorbs. It would take a whole tree just to offset my website.

There is lots you can do to reduce the carbon footprint of your website:

• Use green energy on the server. The Green Web Foundation has a directory you can use to verify the green credentials of your hosting company.
• Measure your carbon footprint. There are several tools for this, including the Website Carbon Calculator, Ecograder, and the Webpage Carbon Emissions Tool, which checks a page against the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance’s 1g target. The measurements give you a benchmark to track your progress against and Ecograder also gives you tips for how you can improve.
• Reduce your file sizes. You could, for example, use a less image-heavy design, remove background videos and compress your files.
• Reduce unnecessary visits. You could do a content audit to delete anything that isn't still useful to visitors, and check your SEO and analytics to make sure you're not attracting visitors who end up leaving straight away.

Those are the first steps. There is much more you can do if you dig deeper. I recommend the books Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood and Designing for Sustainability by Tim Frick.

As for my own website, I hope to be able to drive the carbon footprint down further. I've already made a few refinements, including deleting some images that were used on nearly every page. When I created this site design, my objective was to have something that works well on mobile and is also fast. Sites that meet those goals tend to be relatively low carbon. Faster sites use fewer and smaller files, and so have a smaller carbon footprint. That said, there are still improvements I can make. It's a journey.

It's also an editorial process. When I was writing this blog, I had to decide whether to include the image of the Earth, courtesy of NASA, which I thought would look good and also represent what's at stake in the climate emergency. There's no doubt, though, that there would be a tiny bit less carbon being emitted if I left it out. We all have to work out where we draw the line, given that nobody wants to use a text-only website today.

I hope to write more on this topic in the future. If you'd like to keep up to date with my writing projects, please sign up to my newsletter here.

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