Guest Blog: How “green” is your website?
Guest Blog: How “green” is your website?
This article was written by Megan Morley and Helen Fairley from Six Two.
Six Two are a digital agency specialising in website design, development, support, hosting and optimisation. They have been a valued member of the ESGmark® community since December 2020. Learn more about Six Two here
With an ever increasing focus on the carbon footprint of our business activities, do you know the impact your website is having on the environment? This article explores the benefits of green websites and provides practical advice on how to improve your website’s sustainability.
Like many of us, we’ve recently become more conscious of the carbon footprint of our business activities. As a web agency who makes websites on behalf of our clients, we knew that the internet and website traffic was a big contributor to global carbon emissions - but were amazed when we started digging into the statistics.
A study by the Boston Consulting Group estimated that the internet is responsible for around 1 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions per year. That’s about 2% of total emissions; roughly comparable to the whole of the global aviation industry. - source
Another study by the University of St Andrews found that with the ever-growing volumes of traffic, data centres and servers, the internet could account for an estimated 3.7% of global carbon emissions. Even more frightening is that the figure could double by 2025. - source
Whatever the exact figure, we can’t get away from the fact that it’s big - really big. And it’s only going to increase as we move further and further into the digital age.
Each individual website has its part to play in those big figures. An average website produces 4.61 grams of CO2 for every page view. For websites that have an average of 10,000 page views per month, that makes a staggering 553 kilograms of CO2 per year - as heavy as around 3 Ford Focus cars. - source
This got us thinking about what could be done to reduce the carbon footprint of websites. Our research revealed that aside from the obvious environmental benefits, there are many other business benefits to greener websites.
Benefits of greener websites
Having decent green credentials has shifted from being a ‘nice to have’ to a basic expectation. The spotlight is now on organisations, not just governments, to take up the mantle of environmental responsibility. Embracing this means you’ll be better regarded by your customers, partners and peers and have more opportunities for collaboration.
You also stand to gain deeper, more loyal relationships. Having strong values closely aligned with those of your target customers means you don’t compete solely on price, product and service - customers choose you because of shared values and goals, helping forge more fundamental and long lasting connections.
Good SEO is closely correlated with reducing your carbon footprint. If your website and specific pages appear at the top of search engine results when your customers search for specific words or phrases, there will be less clicks (and therefore less energy consumed) to find what they’re looking for. And you get happier customers and improved online visibility.
In a similar vein, improving your UX (user experience) and website speed goes hand in hand with more eco-friendly credentials. A fast loading website with simpler menus, fewer clicks, informative content and clear calls to action helps to reduce the amount of energy your website consumes, and simultaneously enhance the user experience and improve your website’s conversion rate.
Our wake up call
Knowing the benefits of greener websites, we were keen to understand the carbon footprint of our own website. We launched it 3 years ago when an eco-friendly approach to designing and building websites wasn’t at the forefront of our minds. As such, we weren’t expecting to get a great score, but were nonetheless disappointed by our results:
It was ‘dirtier’ than 74% of web pages tested
1.83g of CO2 is produced every time someone visits
It uses bog standard energy - if it used green hosting, it would emit 9% less CO2
A website like ours that gets around 10,000 monthly page views would produce 219.34kg of CO2 per year - that’s the equivalent of boiling around 30,000 cups of tea or driving an electric car 3,000 km.
We knew it wasn’t good enough. Determined to do better, we set about researching ways to make our own website greener.
Implementing these actions are still a work in progress, but rather than delay sharing our findings until we have a less embarrassing score to share, we felt the right thing to do was to share our learnings as soon as possible.
How to make your website greener
First things first, run your website URL (address) through the carbon calculator to see how your website fares. It will generate a list of specific actions you can take to improve your carbon footprint. Share these with your web team who’ll be able to evaluate the suggestions and recommend which actions to progress with.
Review your website’s content, starting with your top 10 most popular pages (Google Analytics will tell you which pages these are). Could they be tweaked to answer your customers’ questions in a way that’s clearer, more concise and more relevant? This will help customers spend less time browsing your site to find answers, helping reduce energy consumption.
Remember, your content includes images, infographics and videos. Review each asset to see whether they are relevant to your written copy and if they add value to the page. If it does add value, you may be able to compress the image file size or reduce the video length. If it doesn’t, consider removing it all together.
Review your website’s UX (user experience) and user journeys. Are you able to reduce the number of pages and steps it takes for a visitor to find what they’re looking for? Is all the key information on one page, or at least clearly signposted with links, so a visitor doesn’t have to keep clicking (and consuming energy) to find the answers?
Perform an SEO audit to understand how well your website fares. Do you have any technical, structural, on-page or off-site issues? Where do you rank for your target keywords? Do you have any gaps in your content/ keywords? The audit will uncover a number of actions you can take to improve your SEO and visibility, as well as your green credentials.
Measure your website’s speed using a tool such as GTMetrix or Lighthouse and get input from your web team about how to improve it further. Common tactics can include optimising images, minifying scripts, reducing the number of plugins, optimising the database, setting up page caching, moving images and scripts to a CDN and reducing requests and redirects. Faster websites are greener websites, and your customers will thank you too.
You could also consider moving your website to a green hosting provider/ data centre - one with a good Power Usage Efficiency score, which utilizes server caching to reduce server energy consumption and is powered from renewable energy sources. Again, work with your web team to ensure a new hosting provider still meets your technical and security requirements.
In addition to these general areas, there could also be more specific actions you can take based on your website’s age, platform, content, functionality, environment, etc. Talk to your web team to find out what else could be done.
Good is better than perfect
There’s a baseline of content, functionality and design you need on your website to serve the needs of your customers, answer their questions and portray your company in the best light possible.
We don’t believe that websites should be so stripped out that they start doing your customers or business a disservice. We do believe that if we can all reduce the footprint of our websites by 10%, 20%, 30% or more, collectively that will have a huge overall impact.
So, don’t feel daunted if like us, your website doesn’t get a great carbon score - take it as an opportunity to reduce it, and help spread the word.
If you’d like to keep up with our progress or learn more about green websites, make sure you follow us on LinkedIn, Twitter or Facebook.
If you have any questions or would like to talk about your website, feel free to contact us at hello@sixtwo.tech