
Writing for the BBC, technology reporter Sean McManus explores ‘How slimmed-down websites can cut their carbon emissions’.
The average business owner is likely unaware of the carbon footprint of their website, even if they do have a grasp on their organisation’s overall carbon output. Valentina Karellas, owner of an ethical knitwear brand, learnt about her carbon credentials:
“I’m horrified,” says Valentina Karellas. “I know grams because I work with them every day and I know how much 10g weighs. And that’s just one page.”
She’s just learned that every visit to her website’s homepage generates up to 9.89g of carbon emissions. It’s nearly 10 times the 1g target recommended by the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance, an organisation that offers accreditation for environmentally friendly websites.
Karellas runs a clothing brand that strives to be environmentally sustainable: sourcing scrap yarn, producing garments on a hand-powered knitting machine, and using as little energy as possible. Despite all of this, her business’ carbon footprint is inflated by her website.
When her site was built, Karellas had no way of knowing its environmental impact. Now, there are several tools that expose this data and are inspiring businesses to drive down their carbon emissions. For instance, Website Carbon Calculator and Ecograder both estimate your home page’s carbon emissions.
(We were happy to learn that our own website only produces 0.34g of carbon each time someone visits our website homepage).
For Karellas, the environment is her priority, even if it means making some changes to her online shopfront. But what exactly needs to change?
Switching to hosting based on renewable energy is a good start. The Green Web Foundation has a tool for looking up web hosts and their green credentials.
Then it’s a question of reducing the amount of data that is stored and sent across the network, passing through all those machines that use electricity. It’s a challenge when the average size of a web page has increased from 468KB in 2010 to more than 2,000KB today, according to httparchive.org.
As a result of faster internet connections, web developers haven’t had to think so much about their file sizes. Many sites have big images and background videos. These are the leading culprits driving the size of web pages up.
As a creative agency, we understand the challenge at hand: environmental concerns are at the forefront of people’s minds, but so is the success of their businesses. Our job is to work with our clients to understand their objectives, and build websites that help them to meet their goals.
The article outlines lots of advice for organisations looking to reduce the carbon footprint of their websites: making sure that videos don’t start playing automatically, avoiding secondary product images where a zoom effect would suffice, avoiding multiple full-screen photos on a page, optimising image files (WebPs instead of JPEGs), and streamlining the user journey so that time isn’t wasted, which uses even more energy. Making changes like these can really drive down that carbon footprint.
Product design studio Quarterre managed to cut its website carbon emissions by 96%.
They went from nearly 7g of carbon to 0.3g per homepage visit.
They rebuilt the website with a small number of simple pages. Rather than using large hero images, the new site uses smaller images, arranged to create a composite design.
Coloured stripes define the site’s identity. They are created with text instructions and reduce the need for bulky image files.
Behind the scenes, animation and interaction effects were added using HTML and CSS, two fundamental web languages. That meant there was no need to download large JavaScript files often used to do this on other sites.
Although Quarterre works in a highly visual industry, Hartley didn’t experience any compromise in the site design. “We didn’t feel we were missing out on anything,” he says. “The simple graphics and the clean corporate imagery for the studio were satisfying. It looks punchy and vibrant.”
Executing a site like this, especially when working in a highly visual industry, takes great consideration and requires an agency with an expert touch. At Novagram, we understand how to rethink website content and user journeys whilst ensuring the end product is on-brand, and conducive to your organisation’s mission.
BioteCH4, an organisation that turns food waste into energy, is another organisation that has been able to reduce its carbon footprint (by approximately 520kg) all because of a new site design. This amount of carbon would fuel 2,500 miles of air travel.
In addition to the factors already explored, BioteCH4 also looked at reducing its bounce rate.
“We had a lot of traffic arriving at the website,” says Sharon Foster, marketing and brand manager at BioteCH4. “Looking back, that was a vanity metric. The bounce rate showed they didn’t find what they wanted. We were unnecessarily driving people to the website and creating that carbon impact.”
BioteCH4 reviewed all its content, deleted old news stories, and merged what was still useful into richer content pages.
More detailed search engine keywords were used to drive prospective customers – rather than general browsers – to destination pages, which were designed to give them exactly what they wanted.
As a result, the bounce rate was cut by about 21%, and bounces from web searches fell by more than 13%.
“Now, although website numbers have dropped, the people we are driving to the website, through organic searches or paid-for advertising, want to talk to us,” says Foster.
If your organisation is looking to reduce its carbon footprint as part of a website redesign, Novagram can help. We are happy to balance aesthetic gains with environmental benefits, and would love to work with you to improve your digital presence. To discuss your sustainable website design project, get in touch.
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