With the digital industry contributing nearly 4% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, it has become essential for companies to place web eco-design at the top of their priorities. Wondering how you can act at your own level to make digital greener? Here are some ideas and best practices for limiting the environmental impact of your website.
What is web eco-design?
Put simply, web eco-design — also known as sustainable web design or digital eco-design — is an approach that aims to design and develop websites in a way that minimises their impact on the environment. It is an emerging discipline that builds environmental considerations into the earliest stages of designing a website.
The main objective of web eco-design is to reduce energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions and the use of natural resources throughout a website’s life cycle. That includes the design, development and hosting phases, and even use by visitors.
What are the main benefits of web eco-design?
There are several good reasons for wanting to create an environmentally friendly website.
First of all, because the environmental impact of websites is often underestimated. In 2022 there were more than 2 billion websites in the world. Each web page view generates around 4.61 grams of CO2. By choosing to develop a website with an eco-responsible approach, you considerably reduce its energy footprint compared with a traditional website. Even if each saving may seem tiny, it is multiplied by the number of visitors who view your pages.
Another argument in favour of creating environmentally friendly websites is more of a marketing one. Fewer resources to load means faster loading speed. Fast sites tend to convert users better. According to an Amazon study, an increase of just 100 milliseconds in a page’s load time leads to a 1% drop in sales. By optimising your webperf, you not only reduce your environmental impact, you also improve the user experience and increase your chances of conversion.
What is more, loading speed is a factor Google takes into account for search rankings. So a faster site stands a better chance of turning your visitors into customers and of improving its visibility organically.
Finally, adopting web eco-design practices can also bring economic benefits. Lighter, faster websites require fewer server resources, which can translate into substantial financial savings. For example, the online retail giant Etsy cut its energy consumption by 60% by optimising its infrastructure and improving the efficiency of its servers, resulting in annual savings of several million dollars.
Best practices for creating a green website
Do you want to create an eco-responsible website but do not know where to start? There is no real miracle solution — rather a variety of best practices to put in place in order to reduce your website’s ecological footprint. Here are five tips to help you get there.
Assess your website’s impact
This is the first step before redesigning or optimising your site. Tools exist that calculate your website’s digital carbon footprint. Here are a few of them:
Note for the English version: the list of measurement tools announced by this sentence is missing from the French article (the bullet list is empty). The tools need to be added in both languages — for example Website Carbon Calculator, EcoIndex or GreenIT-Analysis.
Choose green hosting
When it comes to web hosting, you have probably heard of Hostinger or OVH. Yet there are other, lesser-known but equally interesting options! Among them, some hosts take a green approach, with offerings that will reduce your energy footprint without compromising on performance.
Take the example of O2switch, a French host that runs mainly on decarbonised energy. The company undertakes not to locate its data centres in places where predominantly fossil-fuel energy would be needed to meet its requirements. On top of that, it has developed in-house solutions for recycling and repurposing its old equipment.
Other hosts have made a bet on eco-responsibility and offer green hosting services:
- PlanetHoster
- Ikoula
- Infomaniak
Avoid heavy and superfluous resources
Some resources are heavier to load than others. Take the example of images on a web page: they should be compressed and weigh on average between 50 kB and 200 kB so as not to slow down loading times. Wherever possible, favour the WebP or JPG formats for your images.
But of course it is video that takes the prize as the most demanding resource! The good news is that there are some very good video compression programs available, such as HandBrake, which reduces the weight of a 1 minute 35 second HD video in 720p by 38% — a saving of 11.7 MB — without any perceptible loss of quality.
Opt for a minimalist design
When creating each web page, ask yourself the following questions: does this element really deserve to be there? Sort through it, keep what matters and create web pages that get straight to the point.
Adopt a “mobile first” approach by prioritising the key elements of your page that absolutely must be visible on a smartphone. Imagine that your site’s visitor has a limited connection or a restricted data allowance. Remember, only the necessary elements should be kept!
By opting for this pared-back approach, you can create a website that is more pleasant, faster and friendlier for your users, without compromising your visual identity.
Optimise your code
In design terms, optimising your code can help create a carbon-neutral website. That means a lightweight DOM, minifying code (HTML, CSS and JS), streamlining SQL queries and other sustainable development best practices.
Some tools can help you with this task:
- UglifyJS: this tool is a JavaScript code minifier. Its main role is to reduce the size of JavaScript files by removing whitespace and comments and shortening variable and function names. This makes the JavaScript code more compact, which translates into faster load times for users and more efficient use of server resources.
- CleanCSS: this tool optimises CSS code by removing whitespace and comments, reducing property lengths and combining CSS selectors where possible.
Other avenues for making digital greener
Is your site still not carbon neutral despite the advice above? Don’t worry, that is perfectly normal.
Beyond eco-design, there are many other ways to make digital greener and reduce its environmental impact. For instance, you can adopt these few everyday habits:
- Regularly sorting through your mailbox
- Putting your screen in dark mode
- Using an eco-responsible search engine (such as Ecosia)
And to go even further, think about carbon offsetting! Many organisations are committed to the fight against climate change. You can support their cause by donating or by taking part in reforestation initiatives. Here are a few interesting projects paving the way for more sustainable digital:
- Tree-Nation: an online platform that allows individuals, companies and organisations to plant trees all over the world to offset their CO2 emissions.
- Code for Trees: an initiative that encourages developers and digital professionals to use their skills to support reforestation and agroforestry projects.
- Digital Climate Strike: a digital movement that encourages tech professionals to mobilise for climate justice and use their influence to promote more sustainable practices.
