You’re here because you want to know how to reduce your environmental impact through your website. There are 8 actions you can learn in 5 minutes to make a difference with your website that will also improve your SEO and customer experience.
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An average website with 10,000 page views per month produces 816kg of CO2 per year.
Switch Your Website to Green Hosting
Green hosting is a sustainable option for powering your sustainable website. It uses servers that are powered by renewable energy sources, with the goal of minimising the environmental impact. The renewable energy used for green hosting comes from natural resources that are replenished at a faster rate than they are consumed.
Green hosting not only helps protect the planet, but it also benefits your business by providing sustainable and eco-friendly options. The renewable energy sources used in green hosting, such as sunlight and wind, are constantly replenished, making it a reliable and environmentally friendly choice. By choosing green hosting, you can ensure that your sustainable website is powered by clean, renewable energy, reducing your carbon footprint and promoting a sustainable future.
Choosing a green hosting provider can help businesses reduce their carbon footprint, appeal to environmentally-conscious consumers, support the use of renewable energy, and meet their sustainability goals.
- Green hosting companies use renewable energy sources and energy-efficient technology, which can help reduce their carbon footprint and combat climate change.
- As more consumers become concerned about the environment, they are looking for products and services that are sustainable and eco-friendly. Choosing a green hosting provider can allow businesses to appeal to these consumers and differentiate themselves from competitors not focused on sustainability.
- By choosing a green hosting provider, businesses can support the use of renewable energy and help accelerate the transition to a more sustainable future.
- Many businesses have sustainability goals, and green hosting can help them achieve them by reducing their environmental impact.
Build Your Website Using a Lightweight Framework
Choosing the right website framework can drastically impact your website in a positive way. If you choose a website builder which has a lot of weight (code) and isn’t efficient in the way it calls pieces of code, it can have a devastating impact not only on your business but also on the environment. Website framework builders should be efficient and easy to use but also optimised for performance and allow users to easily change elements on the website without delay.
Recently, we have been developing our own sustainable website builder framework, which has the most capabilities and the least weight of all the efficient builders. This has been a big project over the last two years, creating a framework that is built especially for sustainable websites that want an efficient builder that has been optimised for speed and accessibility.
Optimise Your Cache
Cache? We’ve all heard about caches, but what are they?! Essentially, a website cache is a temporary storage location on a user’s device where a copy of certain website elements, such as images, scripts, and HTML pages, are stored. When a user requests a page from a website, their web browser checks the cache first to see if a copy of the page is available. This means that less data has to be transferred from your site to theirs and reduces the amount of energy used.
Make your website more sustainable by optimising your cache. This will help reduce the amount of data transferred, reduce energy consumption and support the environment. Optimising your cache also helps users have a better experience on your website and can lead to higher SEO rankings on Google!
Resize & Compress Your Images
We’ve all heard ‘Optimise your images’ being thrown around, but what does this mean? Images are an essential element of your website and play a role in enforcing your brand and painting a picture for any points you make. Have you ever been on a website that will NOT load? This is most likely because they’re using high-resolution images that take longer to load, resulting in a bad user experience. Optimising your images will improve user experience and lower bounce rates. It will also reduce your environmental impact, as less energy is used to transfer smaller, compressed image files.
Utilise Lazy Load
Lazy loading is a technique where media elements such as images and videos are loaded only when they are in the user’s viewport rather than loading all content below the fold. The fold refers to the content that is not immediately visible when a page loads and requires users to scroll down to see it. Using this technique reduces the amount of data transfer required and, in turn, helps save energy and reduce the impact on the environment.
Lazy load not only benefits the environment but also improves your website load time. It is recommended by many web developers, designers and SEO experts as a key element in building websites, especially if your website is heavy (lots of code). By implementing lazy loading for media below the fold, you can improve the sustainability and performance of your website.
Only Use Video When It’s Essential
Video is an amazing tool to engage users, but there’s a big but…
It will impact the website loading time drastically if it’s hosted on your FTP.
This means if you’ve manually uploaded it into your media library. The best practice for videos is to embed them into your website from YouTube and use a lower resolution, as higher-resolution videos can have a drastic impact on your website load time. We also recommend turning off autoplay so visitors have the option to choose whether they want to view each video or not. These optimisations will have a positive impact on your user experience, make savings on data being transferred, and be more eco-friendly!
Clean Up Your Website
Even sustainable websites will have outdated information over time; this not only misleads the user but increases load time and energy consumption. It’s important to schedule regular website clean-ups; an average website should do this every 1-2 months, depending on how much new content is being added and how relatively new your industry is. This will not only enhance the user experience but also improve the website’s performance and reduce its environmental impact. By keeping your sustainable website organised and up-to-date, you can ensure that it is efficient, sustainable and user-friendly.
Optimise Your Website Navigation
Making your website easily navigatable gives users the answers they want faster and reduces energy consumption. Having a clear and logical navigation structure will not only help the environment but is better for user experience. This is a good sign for Google and supports higher SEO rankings. Another way to improve the website’s navigation and reduce energy consumption is to consider the habits of the target audience. This can be done by creating custom interfaces and structures that are tailored to the specific needs and preferences of the target audience. An expert web design specialist can assist in this process, ensuring the website’s navigation is efficient and user-friendly.
How to Create a Sustainable Website
The above eight eco-savvy actions will support you to create a sustainable website that reduces the impact on the environment, whilst providing improved user experience and higher SEO rankings. From switching to green hosting and using lightweight frameworks to optimising images and navigation – every step makes your digital footprint lighter and your website faster. Embrace these changes, and watch your website contribute to a greener future and race ahead in the digital space!
