10 Tips to Make Your Website More Environmentally Friendly 

Eco-friendly websites – a cheat sheet for Marketing teams

The world of digital can seem a million miles away from the sustainability movement. With everything stored in the cloud, your website doesn’t really have an impact on the environment right?

Unfortunately not.

A businesses website has an impact on their total carbon footprint. Largely, this is driven by how much energy a website needs to be kept online and viewed by users. 

Websites are hosted on huge physical servers that are stored in real physical locations. The cloud means that you don’t store the data physically where you are, but it has to be on a physical bit of kit somewhere. The largest data centres are huge buildings, housing enormous values of computer hardware. The energy required to keep those running 24/7 and keep them cool requires an extraordinary amount of energy. ClimateIQ research estimates that energy consumption by data centres is on a par with that of the aviation industry.

How do you make sure you have an eco-friendly website?

1. Green Hosting

The first and easiest thing to do is to switch to green hosting powered by 100% renewable energy. This means your website servers (and data centres) are powered using renewable energy sources rather than relying on the burning of heavy fossil fuels. We are transitioning all client websites in our portfolio onto servers that are powered in this way; it’s an easy way to minimise our impact on the planet by making a simple change.

2. Compress Media

Reducing and compressing the sizes of rich media assets on your site is a sure fire way to speed up loading. This means less electricity to get the site up on a user’s browser, it also means the user has a better user experience.

3. Mobile First

Most people will look at a website on their mobile phone, so design for mobile first with smaller images and later loading pages and assets, especially given that we might even be relying on 4G or 5G internet access over WiFi.

4. Minimise Requests

Reducing and minimising requests whilst combining files and actions will lower the energy needed to run a website. Again, this will also speed up the website experience for users, thus making your website perform even better as a sales tool, regardless of what you do or sell.

5. Enable Caching

Caching allows your website to be saved in users browsers, meaning that when they revisit there is less data that needs to be transferred. This means that less electricity will be used in the process of loading the site.

6. Work on SEO

Less searches = less energy. Really simple changes to the technical set up of the website such as reducing the number of clicks required to get to any page will mean less energy consumption. From a business performance perspective, good SEO means more visibility to your prospective clients and customers.

7. Simple Design

Clean and uncluttered designs make website user experience better, but they also reduce the amount of data that is transferred via servers when the site is loaded.

8. Code Efficiency

Stripping out unnecessary and cumbersome code will ensure your website is running as efficiently as possible. By doing this, as with all actions in this blog, you are reducing the need for more energy to load and deliver a website.

9. Efficient Background

Websites will have a variety of background processes to operate, these all require further energy to run. Taking a look at these background processes and evaluating if they are required or not can also help to lower the energy needed to operate. Optimising background processes speeds up website loading and improves customer journeys.

10. Regular Analysis

When installing and looking at website updates, software updates, app updates and more you should consider the impact that new code and actions might have oil load speed and their contribution to increasing the data behind a website. Staying on top of efficiencies will allow you to reduce the carbon footprint of your website.

We help clients with a number of green initiatives when it comes to their websites. From switching to green hosting to running carbon consumption reports or building green websites from scratch. To find out more about how to drive down your website’s impact on the planet, get in touch.

Find out what sustainability means to Hiyield