Let’s talk about sustainability. As climate change begins to show itself more and more, the need for reducing energy consumption in any shape or form is more prevalent than ever. According to the International Energy Association (IEA), 1 to 3% of global energy consumption is from data centers and data transmission networks. Though this percentage doesn’t seem like a lot in the grand scheme of things, with a huge boom in AI, this number will go up instead of down.
One way to combat this increase is by ensuring websites are as sustainable as possible. To check how your website compares to others in terms of carbon output, use this resource. Ensuring sustainability in websites can reduce their carbon emissions by 96% according to a case study done by Quarterre as featured in BBC’s article. This massive amount of potential reduction could be huge. Let’s talk about how this can happen.
1. Images, Video and Media
These are the biggest sources of energy consumption when it comes to websites. The more types of media you have on a page, the more energy is consumed. Does this mean you have to get rid of all your photos and videos? That might make your website suddenly more boring. There are a few things you can do to keep your images and videos, while still reducing energy consumption.
2. Optimize your images.
Your website most likely won’t be displayed at 7,000 px by 9,600 pixel width, so why are your images that size? Optimizing images means making sure they are the same size as what they actually need to be. To take it one step further, you can compress your images using image compression tools (examples here). Not only does make your site more sustainable, it also increases your load times which makes for a better experience. Learn more from Whole Grain Digital’s article.
3. Reduce Video
Best thing to do is get rid of videos. See if there are possibilities for them to be images instead, or links to your videos that people can choose to go visit if they want to. That’s not possible for everything though, so here’s a few things you can do to help. Turn off autoplay to reduce playtime, keep background videos to 10 seconds or less, and reduce the size of your videos where possible. Check out The Lane Agency’s article where we got some of this information from.
4. Lazy Loading
This is a great technique, which isn’t always used, to ensure less energy used per page load. This can be turned on in most website builder platforms or even added using html with a loading=”lazy” attribute in <img> tags. Lazy loading prevents images from loading until they are entering the screen, so if they aren’t seen, they don’t load. Learn more about this from WP Engine’s article about best practices for sustainable websites.
5. Switch to Sustainable Hosting Platforms
At Perodigm, we tend to use Wix for a lot of our websites. This is great for the customers to help them be able to maintain it without having to use a hard to learn interface, while also making it easier for us to build it to keep costs lower for clients. In terms of sustainability, Wix is actually pretty green too. They use Google Cloud which uses renewable energy (The Smart Bear), continuously assess energy and water efficiency while setting goals to decrease use (Wix reports here), and use energy efficient technology in their offices (Comparably). All in all, Wix is a good hosting platform to use, especially when using the above techniques at the same time.
If you’re wondering what the most green platforms are, here’s some that we found. We haven’t used these, so we can’t back up anything else besides sustainability data.
Their whole brand is all about sustainability, boasting an incredible 300% renewable energy source (meaning they have a negative carbon footprint) which in turn means your website would be neutral or negative as well. They also plant a tree for each new customer as an added bonus.
They use 100% renewable energy, are also an EPA Green Power Partner, and have invested in energy-efficient servers. They also are super transparent with all their energy use, where it goes, and how they’re working to make it even better.
With an offset energy use of 200%, their offices and data centers are powered entirely by wind energy. Founded in 1998, they are one of the first platforms that wanted to dedicate their company to being eco-friendly and sustainable.
Conclusion
Whether you opt in for using a platform dedicated to sustainability, or utilize the tips and tricks to reduce your current website’s carbon footprint, any reduction is better than no reduction. Need help with ensuring your site is as sustainable as it should be? Reach out to us and ask how we can help!
