Every time you visit a website, watch a YouTube video, or comment on a Facebook post, you make a contribution to global carbon emissions. This includes your own websites as well.
The Internet and the devices we use contribute 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions. That is the same amount contributed by the airline industry around the world and it’s expected to double in 2025.
Saving the environment and the world starts with you. One of the most important steps you can take to achieve that goal is to reduce your website’s carbon footprint.
In this post, we will walk you through the process of how a website contributes to global carbon emissions and what you can do to improve it.
What is a Website’s Carbon Footprint?
The global carbon dioxide emissions are the leading cause of global warming. As human activities release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, it absorbs more of the Sun’s heat and accelerates the global warming process.
The massive data centers and server farms where your website is hosted also contribute to global carbon emissions. Every time someone visits your website, these servers have to consume more power to run your website. The heavier and more complex your website gets, the more carbon it will emit.
Why Should You Care?
Why should you bother to improve your tiny website’s carbon footprint when there are giant websites like Facebook, TikTok, and YouTube contribute more to global carbon emissions? Because change starts with you!
If you decide to make a small improvement to your website to reduce its carbon footprint, you will have made the future a better place for you and the future generations. As small as it may be, your actions can make a difference.
What Contributes to a Website’s Carbon Footprint?
There are a few things that contribute to a website’s carbon footprint. These are some of the biggest factors to consider.
Ungreen Hosting Providers
When building a website, you will often search for the cheapest and most affordable web hosting provider to get your website up and running as quickly as possible. However, this is not the best way to reduce your website’s carbon footprint.
Not every web hosting provider is environmentally friendly. Most hosting service providers are able to offer cheaper prices by using data centers that don’t run on renewable energy. And that is the biggest contributor to your website’s carbon footprint.
Large Files and Media
Websites with large image files, videos, and even fancy animations will also affect the carbon footprint. Whenever your website has to display a large image file, the servers will have to consume more power to process those requests.
Third-Party Integrations
Third-party apps that you have integrated with your website will also make a big impact on your website’s carbon footprint. If you’re using plugins or services to track metrics, show widgets, or add additional services, they will not only affect your website’s carbon emissions but also contribute to the carbon footprint of those third-party websites as well.
Scripts and Unorganized Code
The animations, widgets, buttons, and forms on your website all use various scripts to function. These complex code and scripts require extra computation power to run and they will add more to your site’s carbon footprint.
What is Your Website’s Carbon Footprint?
There is a very simple way to measure your website’s carbon footprint. You can go to the Website Carbon Calculator website and test it out.
While the results this website provides may not be 100% accurate, you can use it to have a rough understanding of how big of a carbon footprint your site has.
How to Reduce Your Website’s Carbon Footprint
Here are a few things you can do to lower your website’s carbon footprint.
1. Use Environmentally-Friendly Web Hosting
Choosing an environmentally friendly web hosting provider is the best way to reduce your website’s carbon footprint. Most web hosting providers proudly claim their hosting infrastructure is powered by renewable energy. However, the percentage of renewable energy also matters.
For example, Kinsta uses Google Cloud Platform for its infrastructure, promising a platform powered by 100% renewable energy.
Most platforms won’t disclose this information but you can use a site like Green Web Foundation to find out which hosting providers offer green web hosting services.
2. Optimize Media Files
Optimizing your images, videos, and other media files will also help reduce the energy required to deliver them to website visitors.
You can start by switching to a more lightweight image file format like WebP instead of using JPG. You can also compress videos to lower file sizes or host them on platforms that are powered by renewable energy.
3. Minify Scripts & Code
Getting rid of unnecessary scripts, third-party plugins, and code also helps. The plugins that add popups, banner ads, animations, and various other widgets will only make your website perform worse.
You can also minify your website’s scripts and code to optimize page loading speeds and reduce power consumption.
4. Reduce Unnecessary Crawling & Bots
When you add third-party services to your website that involve tracking visitors and stats, they will send website crawlers and bots more often, which also consumes server resources.
For example, Google Analytics adds lots of scripts and sends more crawlers to your website, making your website slower and consuming more power. Switching to a lightweight alternative will make a big difference.
5. Use a CDN
By using a Content Delivery Network (CDN), you can deliver your website to visitors around the world more efficiently. It will not only make your website perform faster but also help reduce the stress on hosting servers.
6. Use a Clean, Minimal Design
Using a website design with a light and minimal design will also help improve the carbon footprint. A design that uses fewer buttons, animations, and elements will consume less power to display for each visitor.
In Conclusion
Even if you can’t implement all these improvements to your website, consider making at least one or two changes. The tiniest change you make, like adding a dark mode to your website, will help reduce carbon emissions by lowering the power consumption of mobile devices and monitors.
As Mahatma Gandhi once said: “Be the change that you wish to see in the world.”