Your website creates a carbon footprint
Let that sink in for a second as it’s not well-known and something that can take a while to fully understand.
As a super quick overview, the internet and your website create emissions in three distinct ways that all use energy:
- hosting,
- networking, and
- devices.
Hosting
Hosting can be fairly straightforward as it’s simply choosing providers that use renewable energy, which helps reduce the emissions it creates. After a lot of research and development we’re starting to migrate our clients to our new supplier (Mythic Beasts) which uses renewable energy (and has brilliant support) and recommend them to our clients moving forward.
Networking
Focusing on networking, we can boil down digital sustainability to the following equation:
Data = energy = CO2e
This means that the more data being transferred to then be read and rendered by a device, the more energy is needed and the higher the emissions will be. Reducing the amount of data is the key we can control when it comes to how we use digital products and services.
In this context data is everything; every piece of text, every image, every video, every click or interaction generates some data.
It’s also important to note that sustainability-driven design principles and best practices complement any that are focused on accessibility.
In fact, many of the principles that are published, including sustainable web design and the sustainable web guidelines, both have criteria that are human-focused, and user experience will be massively improved by following the guidelines and reducing loading times.
Measuring a website’s carbon footprint
As a website manager or content editor, it might seem impossible to have any impact – but nothing could be further from the truth. The first thing that’s helpful is to know where you currently stand. Tools like Ecograder and Website Carbon are great but they miss out on actionable insights that can help you manage and lower the emissions your website creates.
Luckily, I created Beacon before I joined Studio 24. Beacon is a webpage carbon calculator that gives a page breakdown to give you some direction in how to lower the emissions that the page creates.
If you run a page of your website through Beacon and want to discuss the findings, please get in touch. We are always happy to advise on issues of sustainability and accessibility.
Reducing the carbon footprint
In terms of what anybody can do to start lowering the carbon footprint of their website, one of the most impactful things is to reduce images – both the overall number and their individual file size.
Question their use and if they are needed at all; otherwise compress and resize them – there’s no need to upload an image 1500 pixels wide if it’s only displayed at 300 pixels. Squoosh and TinyPNG are great examples of free online tools that can be used to compress images by more than 70% on average.
Another thing website owners can do is to remove old content. Most content management systems like WordPress or Craft store content in a database; as more and more content is created and stored it can impact on the amount of energy (and time) needed to retrieve the content to then render and display in a browser. Removing this old content saves this energy (which is difficult to measure) and boosts performance too.
Where a developer would come in is with everything else
Images aren’t the only files that websites use and, as developers, we can look at JavaScript files that add interaction, such as maps, tabs or carousels, and CSS files, which add the styling, and remove any unnecessary code to reduce their size and reduce emissions.
We can also cache these assets heavily so that repeated visits have much lower emissions. We can also look at optimising back end scripts to ensure they are more efficient and use less energy to fulfil a request.
Our commitment to sustainability
Just like accessibility, we realise that sustainability shouldn’t be a layer added at the end of a project, but instead should be baked in from the start. This is why we’re beginning the journey to look at how we can make sustainability a part of every project from start to finish and integrate sustainability-driven guidelines into our daily practice.