Digital sustainability
The amount of electricity consumed by the internet is growing rapidly. As a result, the carbon emissions produced by data centres, transmission networks and user devices is increasing exponentially. This means that the internet’s carbon footprint is massive, and getting bigger.
What is my website’s carbon footprint?
Not all websites are created equal. Some sites are a lot more energy intensive than others. If the user has to click around through lots of pages to find what they are looking for, their visit will produce a lot more carbon than if they can navigate easily. Additionally, when large image sizes are used inappropriately, energy is being consumed unnecessarily.
Whatever stage you are at in your digital sustainability strategy, there are lots of ways you can reduce your website’s carbon emissions.
Take a look at the following factors that influence your website’s carbon consumption
Complicated user journeys result in your visitors loading up lots of pages before they find what they’re looking for. In addition to this being inconvenient for your users, this is an unnecessary use of resources. A user-centric design approach can help your visitors navigate your website more effectively and reduce the number of clicks it takes to get them to their destination.
Setting parameters within WordPress to resize images appropriately will reduce the energy required to load them. This means that you can upload images of any reasonable size to your site and the CMS will manage the size they are displayed. In addition to the environmental benefits of doing this, reducing your image loading times will improve your website’s Core Web Vitals score.
We host our websites in data centres that are powered by renewable energy. This means that along with being fast, reliable and secure. Our hosting packages are doing their bit to reduce the internet’s huge carbon footprint.
The benefits of having a low carbon website
In addition to the benefits to the planet, reducing your website’s energy consumption is advantageous for other reasons. Google’s Core Web Vitals rewards websites with fast loading times and energy efficient websites will naturally produce better loading speeds. As a result, your website will be promoted above slower sites in search engine rankings.
Having a streamlined website with fast loading times will benefit your users, encouraging return visits and completed transactions.
We believe that a fast, eye-catching and accessible website doesn’t need to cost the earth