You read that right: a website should also be environmentally friendly. You might think that since websites are digital assets, they don’t leave a carbon footprint. However, websites consume large amounts of energy to load for users and appear in search results.
Here we explain how your website impacts the environment and how to reduce its carbon footprint.
What impact does a website have on the environment?
According to statistics, an average website produces 211 kg of CO2 emissions per year. This is equivalent to 1055 km of driving a car . And that's just for one website.
There are almost 2 billion websites in the world, according to Statista. This makes the Internet the sixth largest consumer of electricity on the planet. As a result, on a global scale, it produces around 2% of global CO2 emissions annually – equivalent to the aviation industry.
4 ways to make your website greener
Once you've calculated your website's carbon footprint, you can take steps to canada whatsapp number data reduce it even further. Take a look at the steps below and see if you can implement any that you haven't yet taken.
Having a green hosting partner for your website is the first step towards an eco-friendly website. If you are still deciding which hosting provider to choose, or want to check if yours offers green hosting services, just visit their website and look for green practices and initiatives, such as using renewable energy sources (e.g. wind and/or solar power) to power their servers, recycling or reducing waste, and similar commitments to the environment.
Why is it so important? Here are some statistics that show how important the role of your hosting provider is when it comes to creating and maintaining an environmentally friendly website.
On average, a website produces 4.61 grams of CO2 for every pageview . However, at SiteGround, we put a lot of time and effort into hosting greener websites. As a result, for websites hosted with us, each site visit equates to approximately 1.7 grams of CO2 emissions – almost three times more carbon-efficient than the industry average . Here are some of the things we do to achieve this:
100% neutralized energy
Our data center infrastructure is powered by the Google Cloud Platform, which matches 100% of the electricity consumed by the servers with energy from renewable sources. This strategy ensures high redundancy, optimal web speed, and sustainability.
Data centers close to end users
SiteGround uses over 10 data centers around the world to host our clients' websites. The closer the server is to the majority of visitors, the faster the website will load and the less power it will consume.
Servers with the latest technology
We constantly optimize our server software and develop powerful tools to maximize efficiency and minimize resource usage. Some of these tools are our own CDN that caches site content on multiple servers in different continents, custom PHP configuration that improves page loading by up to 30%, SuperCacher that enables full page caching to make websites up to 5 times faster.
Optimize the performance of your website
If you have already hired a green hosting provider for your website, that is a solid foundation for having an environmentally friendly website. The next thing you need to think about is the loading speed of your website.
A slow website consumes more energy to load . If your website is slow, it will require a lot of processing power from the server, for every visitor that comes and tries to load it. Therefore, your site produces more carbon emissions.
Improving your website's loading times will result in lower energy consumption, undeniably improving the user experience of your website visitors, and ultimately, a more environmentally friendly website. Here are some practical tips to increase your website's loading speed:
Optimize the use of images
To improve your website’s loading speed, you need to optimize your use of images. First, consider which images you use and reduce them by removing unnecessary ones and/or concentrating them in single files. Second, prioritize and load critical images first: those ab
