It may seem like an odd thing to think about, seeing as your website isn’t a tangible item, however, there are various ways in which we can think about the environmental impacts and how to reduce them.
The first step in creating environmentally friendly websites is understanding the environmental impact of a website.
It may not be immediately obvious, but, it takes energy to run the internet and therefore your website. The energy to run the infrastructure involved in keeping the internet up and running contributes significantly to global energy consumption, so it’s important to do what we can to keep ourselves as green as possible.
With the above in mind, sustainable web design focuses on reducing the above environmental impact of websites and all things to do with digital services by optimising energy consumption, minimising data waste, and improving overall efficiency.
Commonly, sustainable web design is broken down into these main categories:
But how do we put these principles into action?
As website optimisation plays a large part in having an eco-friendly website, the best place to start is by looking at optimising your website to its full potential. Not only is it a good way to reduce the load on your servers, but there’s an added benefit to your web users as well, giving them a smoother, quicker, and overall better experience.
One easy way to do this is by optimisation all images and media on your website. Start by ensuring that you’re using modern formats (for example, WebP or AVIF) and once that’s done, make sure your images are not only the correct size for the space needed (for example, you don’t need an image that’s 2048px x 2048px for an area where the image shown is only 200px x 200px) but also compressed. You can even get plugins such as Smush that easily compresses all of your images in one go, without affecting how the images look.
Another simple way to put sustainable web design into practice is by simply choosing a hosting provider that uses renewable energy. These hosting providers use renewable energy such as wind or solar to offset their carbon emissions. You can also think about the location of the server itself, as servers in cooler locations will require less energy for cooling.
Finally, you can get a developer to take a look at the coding of your website itself. Using clean, lightweight code and avoiding any unnecessary plugins and themes can help offload your website and ensure that it’s running as quickly as it can be.
It may not be something that springs to mind, however, it’s important to know that websites do have an environmental impact, and more importantly, that there is a way that you’re able to reduce this and keep sustainability at the forefront of your business ethos.
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