Building a Sustainable Website

Environmentally friendly web design is a fairly new concept, but it is starting to gain traction. Cutting down on the amount of code behind the scenes of a website and reducing the amount of power required to run it, reduces its CO2 footprint. Fairwind Creative is continuously looking for ways to cut back on carbon emissions that contribute to climate change. This article talks about the ways to achieve a low-carbon, sustainable website—which not only helps shine a light on your company’s corporate social responsibility but also gives Mother Earth a desperately needed boost.

A World in Motion

The world has established a harmful addiction to moving pictures. Including them on your website helps to attract attention, but at what cost? If your livelihood depends on video, that’s one thing, but displaying a video on your site just “because it looks pretty” does not say much about your respect for the planet.

If possible, don’t include videos on your website. The trend to display a full-screen homepage video—popular with realtors, vacation resorts, and other tourist destination websites—not only slows down website performance but drastically increases the website’s carbon footprint. Video is the #1 culprit for driving up the IT industry’s annual carbon footprint, and a few years ago it actually pushed it beyond the levels of pollution produced by the airline industry. Stop and think about that for a moment.

If you absolutely need videos on your website, upload them first to YouTube, then have your web developer embed them onto your website using special code. Although YouTube’s annual carbon footprint is enormous—about 10Mt CO2e (million metric tons) of carbon dioxide equivalent, according to research—Google once claimed that they had a plan to achieve net-zero carbon emissions by 2023. That’s just not possible in today’s tech-hungry economy. They started by purchasing carbon offset credits for all emissions derived from its services (including YouTube), but as that doesn’t really solve the problem, they are now building in-house methods to achieve their carbon neutrality goals, including transforming their energy system and building low-carbon facilities. Their have a new goal date of 2030 – we’ll see what happens.

Content Delivery Networks

If you have a large website (10GB or larger) with tons of images, documents, and other big files, you might consider using a content delivery network (CDN) to serve the images when users load your site in their browsers. Not only will this improve the website’s speed, but it will ensure that you’re not relying on the energy source used by your host. Content delivery networks (like Cloudflare) affect how incoming traffic is routed by using network proxies. These IP address aliases serve as a bridge between users and the internet, improving functionality, security, and privacy.

While network proxies are not directly related to lowering a website’s carbon footprint, the improved speed and reduced demand for server resources are arguably a benefit. However, it’s important to remember that not all CDNs are environmentally friendly. That energy has to come from somewhere. Both Cloudflare and Amazon Web Services (two of the top dogs) offset 100% of their power with renewable energy. All websites require energy to run, and it’s best to support renewable energy if given a choice.

Green Web Hosting

If your website is 10GB or smaller (which is the vast majority), you don’t need a CDN. Just need to make sure your web host handles energy responsibly. All websites hosted with Fairwind are powered 100% by wind and energy.

Green web hosting, also known as eco-friendly web hosting or sustainable web hosting, refers to web hosting services that prioritize environmental sustainability and minimize their carbon footprint. Traditional data centers and web hosting operations consume significant amounts of energy, which can contribute to carbon emissions and harm the environment. Green web hosting providers take steps to mitigate these environmental impacts through various means.

We published an extensive article on Green web Hosting, in case you’d like to learn more.

Important to note:

Offsetting is not the be-all and end-all of green IT solutions. The energy powering your website is still consumed, and the bulk of that energy, sadly, is still derived from fossil fuels. Matching that energy consumption by investing in wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources is a great start, but what can be done to make sure less energy is required in the first place?

How to Achieve a Sustainable Website

The best way to minimize your website’s CO2 footprint is to minimize the code require to run it. Building a truly sustainable website means resorting to some more traditional hard-coding methods rather than relying on out-of-the-box, drag-and-drop features that were invented strictly for human convenience, not Mother Earth’s. The way we were building websites in the late 1990s was tremendously better for the environment, but we’ve grown spoiled with all the bells and whistles that continuously roll out.

Here are some ways to strive for a sustainable website:

Trim the fat

Ask your web developer to perform an audit of your website to check for any old, unused files that might be sitting around from past years, cluttering up the code. In our Website Hygiene article, we outlined some great tips to help you regularly clean the cobwebs and help you achieve a more sustainable website!

Utilize caching plugins, reduce server requests

A cache is a temporary storage location that speeds up retrieval time by saving frequently requested data. (For example, if the footer of your website features a picture of fluffy white clouds, why would you want to waste the energy required to load that image every time a visitor opens a different page?) Cached content is stored locally on your computer or in memory where it can be accessed quickly and easily whenever needed, making web pages load faster.

Optimize images

After video, images are a huge drain on website energy. To point out a few rules:

1. 1. All photographs should be compressed to about 60–75% quality and scaled to the proper size for their use prior to uploading (automated image compression plugins are just more wasted energy);
   2. Whenever possible, convert photos to .webp format prior to uploading, and ensure all icons and other vector style graphics are .svg format; and
   3. Regularly purge your website of any unused images (this should only be done by a web developer, or else the removal of those images can break elements of your website or damage your website’s search engine rankings.

Minimize code

A popular way to build a sustainable website is to reduce the number of elements on any given web page, particularly those requiring JavaScript or CSS files. Compression and minification of these elements will reduce the size and number required to load a page. Removing parts of these scripts (things like tracking pixels etc.) can significantly decrease load time, ensuring that visitors only see what’s required and the data they download in order to load the page in their browser window is minimized. This saves bandwidth and energy!

Green your coding

“Green coding is an environmentally sustainable computing practice that seeks to minimize the energy involved in processing lines of code and, in turn, help organizations reduce overall energy consumption (IBM, Jan. 2023). Using a “lean coding” approach aims to reduce code bloat, a term used to refer to unnecessarily long or slow code that is wasteful of resources – a good example of this is open-source code (WordPress plugins are a good example). This brings us to our next point, themes.

Choose your WordPress theme carefully

Most WordPress themes and page-builders are heavily bloated with features you’ll never use. Fairwind is very selective about the themes we use for our clients’ websites, and we can help you make educated decisions about the functionality you opt to build into the framework of your sustainable website. Here’s an article we published on the topic of WordPress Themes.

Reduce plugins

Not all plugins are created equal. Some are fantastic—well coded and reliable—but others are completely subpar or just wasteful “fluff”. Some even open up your website to hackers. Long story short, Fairwind has vetted hundreds of plugins over many years and we know which ones help and which ones hurt. When factoring in the eco-friendliness of plugins, we’ll help you choose ones that are more lightweight, with only the core essential qualities needed to accomplish the desired task—things like calendars, audio or video players, pox-up boxes, elaborate web forms—functionality that already exist and would save you countless hours of custom coding by not having to replicate. (After all, why recreate the wheel?) Also, when a plugin’s functionality a small, such as injecting a small snippet of code into a website header, we commonly apply the necessary change directly to the template to prevent unnecessary plugin maintenance.

Minimize browser tracking

A great way to make your website greener is to minimize the amount of tracking that’s performed to send data back to integrated third-party software.

• • Some WordPress plugins, themes, and other integrations continuously track and send data back to various plugin developers, which helps them identify issues and continuously improve functionality. Helpful in some cases, but it’s also a drain on energy sources. Removing the extra steps required for third parties to receive requested content mean less load on servers and faster loading time, which improved user experience and increases conversions!
  • And when it comes to measuring your website traffic, the ever-popular Google Analytics is not without fault—first, its multitudes of data tools are overkill for most people—to complicated to master—and second, the sheer volume of data collected and processed can lead to increased energy consumption and digital emissions. Therefore, Fairwind has started working with companies who provide smaller-scale, more environmentally friendly analytics software tools. Ask us!

Utilize Carbon Audit Tools

Ever wondered about the carbon footprint of your website? It’s probably not something that keeps you up at night, but it should be on your radar. Utilizing carbon audit tools can help you measure and understand the environmental impact of your site. These tools give you a clear picture of how much carbon your digital presence is emitting, which is like stepping on the scales after the holidays. It might be a bit alarming, but it’s essential for making improvements. Once you have this data, you can make informed decisions to reduce your footprint, like optimizing server usage or streamlining your code. It’s the digital equivalent of switching from a gas-guzzling SUV to a sleek, electric car—much cooler and way better for the environment. The Website Carbon Calculator is a tool we frequently use.

Become a Net-Zero Hero!

Fairwind now offers a unique product called the Net-Zero Website! This is a GREAT way for small businesses to get started with an impactful online presence that supports the planet while reducing their upfront costs! Reach out if you’re ready to soar to new heights with us in our battle to minimize the environmental impact of websites and all forms of digital marketing.