3 Ways to Reduce Your Website's Carbon Footprint

There are three ways to drastically reduce a website’s carbon footprint.

The simplest one is to switch to a green web server. There are a few web hosting providers either offering machines powered by renewable energy or offsetting their carbon emissions through monetary means. Most web services and web hosting providers on the market aren’t environmentally friendly, but there are tools to guide you in your technological choices, such as the Green Web Foundation’s website check. Surprisingly, most GAFA companies run on green energy.

Another way is to make fewer, smaller requests to web servers. Not only it is the most effective way to consume less energy, but it also greatly increases your website’s performance. The less time it takes for a server to return a response, and the less the load on the network is, the better the user experience. Using service workers and efficient cache policies in an offline-first approach, the amount of energy needed to use an app decreases considerably. It’s especially true for static websites whose content is by definition less prone to change.  

Last but not least, better content and a better navigation experience are needed to decrease noise and allow users to find information much faster. The faster a user finds what he’s looking for, the more he is likely to convert. If a visitor needs to go through 10 webpages to find a relevant article, the carbon footprint will naturally increase.