How to measure and reduce the carbon footprint of your site?

Nowadays, the preservation of the environment and, in a broader sense, ecology is a subject that is becoming increasingly important. Indeed, the world is gradually becoming aware of the environmental problems that exist and the need to reduce its impact on the planet.

In the field of the web and digital technology, these environmental issues have their place because it pollutes a lot. In fact, digital technologies generate a significant ecological cost through their manufacture, supply and storage.

In this article, we will learn how to measure the carbon footprint of your website and how to reduce this ecological impact.

What is the carbon footprint of a website?

Every time we visit a web page, we pollute. The simple fact of consulting a site or even watching a video generates a carbon footprint.

Indeed, when we visit a site, a multitude of actions that are invisible to us take place. All these actions lead to a large number of requests sent to a server which will process them and send a response. These so-called "HTTP" requestsconsume energy, electricity. And when electricity is consumed, CO2 isalso generated.

The problem nowadays is that websites are increasingly full of images, videos, animations, etc. The more elements a page contains, the more requests it receives and the more it pollutes. The more elements a page contains, the more requests it receives and the more pollution it causes. With the democratisation of the internet and the number of pages consulted per day, the consequences are disastrous for the environment.

How to test and know the carbon footprint of your website?

There are many free online tools to find out the impact of your web pages on the environment.

Carbon audit tool 1: Website carbon

The first online tool to test the carbon footprint of one's website is Website carbon. The site highlights this statistic: "An average web page displayed on the Internet produces about 1.76 grams of CO2".

The site gives a score according to 5 criteria:

• Data transfer over the network
• Energy intensity of web data
• Energy source used by the data centre
• Carbon emission intensity of electricity
• Website traffic

If your website is "clean", you can even get a badge and put it forward.

Carbon audit tool n°2: Ecograder

Ecograder is another tool that exists to test the performance related toweb eco-design. To generate this score, the tool analyses the content of your site (HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and hosting information) and performs various tests.

The site gives a score based on 6 tests:

• Is your site hosted by a green/sustainable hosting provider?
• How searchable is your website according to MozRank?
• How many HTTP requests are there on the home page of your site?
• How fast is your Google page according to Google Page Speed Insights?
• Is your site designed primarily for mobile phones or is it reactive?
• Have you avoided using Flash on your site?

How to reduce the carbon impact of your website?

Now that you are aware of thecarbon footprint your site generates, let's look at some simple and effective solutions you can implement to improve your score.

1. Reduce the size of your files

All files on your site have a weight. The higher the weight, the more it overloads your web pages. Heavy pages are pages that take a long time to load and require more energy to load. Simply reducing the weight of your files will improve the performance of your site. In addition, you can remove unnecessary files from your site (that you don't use, but that still take up space). You can use lazy load to avoid loading a page in one go.

2. Delete unnecessary animations

Animations on a web page can create a "wow" effect. However, you should be aware that animations add a lot of weight to your pages. They require a lot of resources to be loaded and slow down your pages. It is therefore advisable not to put them everywhere.

3. Write qualitative (and not duplicated) content

This will be as good for reducing the carbon footprint of your pages as it is for your SEO. Indeed, writing quality content will capture users and reduce the bounce rate. In addition, writing relevant content will prevent you from writing duplicate content. Duplicate content is not good for SEO. It will use unnecessary energy resources because another page already exists and your crawl budget will be wasted.

4. Optimize your images

Optimising your images is a crucial point, but one that is generally not done very well by the people who manage a site. Why optimise your images? To reduce the weight of your pages and for SEO purposes. An image at the right size and compressed will only have beneficial effects for your site. Discover in this article, how to optimize your images through dimensions and formats.

5. Avoid videos as much as possible

Videos and GIFs require a lot of resources to be displayed. It is advisable to limit the use of these types of media files on your site. However, it is still possible to use an embed. That is to say, integrate a video on your web page via a URL from a hosting platform (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.)

6. Do not have too many fonts

All fonts have a defined weight (up to 250 kb). Using too many of them on your site will make the site heavier and thus be harmful to the environment. Therefore, it is essential not to use more than 2 or 3 different fonts.

7. Choose a good host

The choice of your web host can have a big impact on your carbon footprint. Some are not very eco-friendly. To choose a web host with the environment in mind, choose one that is close to your home. Some web hosts even use green energy.

8. Choosing the right colors for your site

The colours on a site can also have an impact on the environment. Dark colours will have a reduced impact while flashy colours are more energy consuming. For your daily life, using dark modes in applications can reduce your carbon footprint.

9. Minimize your code

Still on the subject of the weight of the site and the loading time of your pages, the fact of minifying the code (HTML + CSS) of your site will make it possible to use fewer resources.

10. Use caching

In the same spirit as the previous point, using caching also allows you to lighten the weight of your site and improve loading time performance.

That's it! Now you know what you have to do to have a lower impact on the environment with your website. In its Webflow website development offer, Digidop assures you to have a website with a low carbon footprint and thus a reduced ecological impact.