Reducing website emissions – Top Tips

We've put together a simple guide to help you make your website eco-friendly and low-carbon.

Top Tips

Here is a simple guide that may help you make your website as eco-friendly and low-carbon as possible. Focus on 3-4 tips that work for you and request a complete website audit from us to measure progress here.

• Keep the page size/weight as low as possible. Evaluate the content of every aspect of your site; if its usefulness is in doubt, leave it out.
• Images make up a significant amount of the page weight. You can use https://tinypng.com/ or https://shortpixel.com/ to compress photos one by one. Simply upload the image, and it will give you the same image that is now compressed (small file size). The compressed images can then be added to the website.
• Get rid of the old unnecessary images. Upload images at the correct scale instead of relying on CSS to resize them for you.
• Instead of JPEG, PNG, and GIF, use SVG graphics and CSS. WebP, followed by JPG, is often regarded as the most efficient image format. However, depending on the unique qualities of each image, there are some exceptions. Always save an image at the necessary size and compression level, and experiment with several file formats to find the most efficient one.
• Lazy-loading images is another great way to reduce data transfer.
• Please don’t set videos to auto-play. Have a link to open in a host like YouTube or Vimeo. If you have videos on the page itself try to compress them and do not have them on auto-play.
• Use a caching solution to reduce the amount of processing required to load a page for the user. Caching is the process of storing resources from one request and reusing those resources for subsequent requests. It reduces amount of server bandwidth required to display pages for the user.
• Write clean and efficient code – Sending data to a browser uses energy; the less code you send, the less energy/electricity you use. Check if there are unnecessary plugins, plugins that you don’t need – get rid of them.
• Minimise the use of custom fonts. Fonts are a big contributor to the weight of a web page. System fonts can be used with no impact on page weight at all. If possible stick to modern web fonts like WOFF and WOFF2, which use higher compression methods.
• Reduce tracking and unnecessary advertising scripts that rarely offer any value to visitors to your website.
• Use mobile solutions like AMP to trim down the current version of a webpage whenever possible. Google’s AMP project is an open-source initiative that enables fast delivery of website content. AMP allows web pages to load almost instantly, up to 90 percent faster than current standards.
• Improve Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of the website. This helps people find the information they are looking for easily and quickly without having to go through many pages of the website unnecessarily wasting energy.
• Look at offloading large media for example PDF, DOCX, and MP3 resources on the site to third-party providers who are environment-friendly. You can also offload and cache the delivery of your large media with a content delivery network (CDN).

The above tips will also 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.

Get your website audited

Eco-Friendly Web Alliance (EFWA) offers a free website audit, not just for one page of the website but for the whole pages, capturing all pages.

Get your free website audit here