Eco-friendly web design: how to reduce your website’s carbon footprint
February 24, 2022
A simple guide on how to reduce carbon emissions of websites, to get them to be more eco-friendly.
February 24, 2022
A simple guide on how to reduce carbon emissions of websites, to get them to be more eco-friendly.
The coming years will be vital for the planet’s health and human well-being, and every action counts on our journey to net zero. While the attention has been on transportation, roads, and buildings, internet emissions have gone unnoticed, accounting for approximately 4% of global carbon emissions, more than the aviation industry, and consuming 10% of global electricity, the majority of which is sourced from fossil fuels. Websites play a significant role in this consumption.
The average website produces about two grams of CO2 every time someone visits a page. Sounds small right? But with half a million monthly page views, in a year that becomes 11 tonnes of CO2. Maybe yours is less busy than that. But there are two billion websites in the world and it all adds up to billions upon billions of tonnes of CO2 needlessly going into our air.
Every single website has the power to make a difference.
The internet’s ecosystem includes data centres, transmission networks and user devices like computers and smartphones. Websites particularly through their use of data centres add to this enormous consumption.
As designers or anyone designing a website for themselves or for anyone else, we should be mindful of the environmental impact. This article is intended to be a simple guide that may help you get your website to be as low-carbon as possible and therefore eco-friendly. This may help improve your site performance as well as how the site ranks on search engines. It goes without saying that we should not create websites that we don’t need. If it is an existing website or a new website the following may help you to get your website to be eco-friendly — measuring under 1 gram of CO2 per page view (CO2e), by keeping the page size low and reducing data transfer. Website Carbon Calculator at www.websitecarbon.com is a tool that we recommend, which gives you a reasonably good estimate of carbon emissions of your webpages.
Below are some tips to reducing the amount of data transfer from websites to help them become more eco-friendly.
How did these tips work for you? Do you have more ideas on how to reduce the carbon footprint of a website? Then, feel free to share your tips and thoughts in our community, helping others to be eco-friendly.
Below are a few recommend links for tools and further reading on eco-friendly web design and internet.
Carbon Calculator for Websites https://www.websitecarbon.com/
Carbon Calculator for Websites by EFWA (an updated version to be released) https://websiteemissions.com/
Wholegrain Digital Blog https://www.wholegraindigital.com/blog/
How green is your website? https://ecograder.com/
Book: Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services by Tim Frick
Mightybytes Blog https://www.mightybytes.com/blog/
Book: Sustainable Web Design by Tom Greenwood
Written by Team EFWA