With climate change increasingly impacting the world and our lives, sustainability has never been more important. But true environmental consciousness extends beyond common tasks such as reducing plastic use or adopting sustainable energy sources – it must also apply to things like our digital activities.
A website, while essential for your business in an increasingly digital world, can be a hidden contributor to carbon emissions. In fact, a 2018 report found that the internet is responsible for 3.7% of global emissions. Not only is this more than the aviation industry (only 2.4% of worldwide carbon emissions in the same year), it is also continuing to grow annually.
So, for businesses committed to sustainability, building and maintaining an eco-friendly website is crucial. But how do you ensure your site is doing its part to reduce its environmental impact?
At Thunderbolt, our team of professional web designers in Surrey are passionate about helping our clients make their websites both visually effective and more sustainable. In this blog, we’ll offer practical tips to reduce your website’s carbon footprint and increase its eco-friendliness.
Why Are Some Websites Bad for the Environment?
According to the Sustainable Web Manifesto, if the internet were a country, it would be the 4th largest global polluter. If you are wondering how this could be possible, the answer is surprisingly simple: the internet requires massive energy usage.
Every time a website is loaded, data travels across networks, drawing on electricity that often comes from fossil fuels. Large images, videos, and other complex features web designers in Surrey might use can increase the amount of data transferred, which in turn requires more energy.
Additionally, servers and data centres, which host websites, require vast amounts of power for storage, processing, and cooling. The individual devices used to access the internet also need energy to function.
The cumulative effect of billions of web pages being accessed daily leads to a substantial carbon footprint, making the digital world an often-overlooked contributor to global pollution.
What is Sustainable Web Design and Development?
Sustainable web design and development is the practice of creating websites that minimise their environmental impact by taking actions to reduce their energy consumption and carbon emissions. It involves optimising website performance and reducing data transfer through strategies such as efficient coding, streamlined design, and the use of eco-friendly hosting services.
By adopting such practices, sustainable web designers in Surrey aim to create websites that not only offer excellent user experiences but also have a smaller carbon footprint. This contributes to a greener, more sustainable digital environment.
Websites like Website Carbon Calculator provide valuable insights into how eco-friendly your website currently is, by measuring its carbon emissions.
How Web Designers in Surrey Can Make Your Website More Environmentally Friendly
1. Optimise Your Website Images and Multimedia
Images and videos are often the largest contributors to a website’s page weight, which is the amount of data that needs to be downloaded or transferred from a server to load a web page.
Heavy media files will not only slow down your website, but also increase the energy needed to load each page. Optimising your images and multimedia is a simple yet effective way to reduce your website’s environmental impact.
Some key ways for web designers in Surrey to do this include:
- Compressing images without sacrificing quality. Image formats such as Google’s WebP offer high-quality visuals at smaller file sizes.
- Lazy loading images, so that they only appear when needed, for example as the user scrolls down the page. This reduces the initial data load.
- Using vector graphics (SVG files) for logos and icons where possible. These are scalable, lightweight, and ideal for reducing data transfer.
By implementing these changes, your website will load faster, providing an enhanced user experience while also being more energy-efficient.
2. Suggest Green Hosting Providers
Choosing a green hosting provider that aims to offer a top-notch service while reducing their carbon footprint is one of the most impactful ways to make your website greener.
When searching for web hosting options, look for companies that are powered by 100% renewable energy, actively offset their carbon emissions, and participate in initiatives aimed at reducing the environmental impact of data centres.
Thunderbolt’s team of web designers in Surrey have helped many environmentally-conscious clients switch to some of the UK’s best green hosting providers. This small change can have a major positive effect on reducing your website’s carbon footprint.
3. Simplify Your Website Design
Minimalist design isn’t just a popular trend – it’s also a key strategy for improving your website’s sustainability.
By simplifying your web design, you can reduce the number of server requests and data transfers, leading to less energy consumption. A simpler website is not only more energy-efficient but also more user-friendly, creating a better experience for your visitors.
Web designers in Surrey should create a streamlined, eco-friendly design by:
- Reducing the number of elements on each page. They should stick to essential features and avoid excessive animations or unnecessary widgets.
- Optimising your navigation. A clear and simple menu structure allows users to find what they’re looking for quickly, reducing the time spent loading different pages.
- Avoiding complex, resource-heavy frameworks that slow down your site and require more processing power.
- Using system fonts for website content instead of custom web fonts. Custom fonts can increase page load times and energy consumption (due to additional server requests), whereas system fonts are pre-installed on most devices so don’t require additional loading.
4. Use Efficient Coding Practices
Behind every website is a framework of code, and the efficiency of this code can dramatically influence your site’s sustainability. Redundant code increases the energy needed to load your website. Streamlining your code is crucial for an eco-friendly digital presence.
To ensure your code is lean and efficient, web designers in Surrey can collaborate with developers to make sure that they:
- Minify CSS and JavaScript files. This involves removing unnecessary characters, spaces, and comments, reducing file size and improving loading speeds.
- Use asynchronous loading for scripts. This ensures that your site’s important content loads first, improving both user experience and energy efficiency.
- Use lightweight themes and plugins from content management systems (CMS) like WordPress.
Our in-house team of web developers and web designers in Surrey can help ensure your website’s code is optimised for both performance and sustainability, to lower your site’s carbon footprint without sacrificing functionality.
5. Purchase Renewable Energy Certificates
If you’ve already implemented all the above suggestions but are still looking for more ways to reduce your environmental impact, you could consider purchasing renewable energy certificates (RECs).
These credits offset the carbon emissions produced by your website and can help balance out any unavoidable environmental costs.
It is always best to do thorough research before purchasing RECs, to ensure that it is the right choice for your business and that you are choosing a reputable supplier.
Contact Thunderbolt’s Web Designers in Surrey for a Greener Website
Sustainability isn’t just about choosing eco-friendly products or reducing waste – it’s about the digital choices we make, too.
By asking your web designers in Surrey to follow green practices such as optimising images, simplifying your web design, suggesting green hosting, and following efficient coding practices, you can significantly reduce your website’s carbon footprint.
At Thunderbolt, our team of expert web designers in Surrey is committed to creating websites that are not only functional and visually appealing but also environmentally responsible. Let us help you make your website greener, so that together we can contribute to a more sustainable digital future.
Get in touch today to schedule a meeting or find out more about our full range of digital services.