How to Make Your Website More Sustainable
The following article was written by Guest contributor Dakota Murphey. Dakota is an established freelance writer who regularly contributes to a number of authoritative resources online. She covers topics ranging from travel, photography and sustainability to company growth, business trends and branding. She can be found on:
Website: https://dakota@dakotamurphey.co.uk - Twitter: @Dakota_Murphey - LinkedIn: /dakota-murphey
Businesses everywhere are feeling the benefits of digitisation, which can unlock tremendous opportunities and potential for scaling companies. Websites, in particular, have evolved from a ‘nice to have’ for many businesses to an absolute necessity for firms trying to promote green credentials, maintain a competitive edge, market to new sectors, streamline operations, and generate interest in their brand and business.
Another priority for many business owners worldwide is sustainability and finding innovative ways to maintain their new-found operational potential, while minimising their environmental impact. Balancing the priorities of both digitisation and sustainability does, however, create the proverbial double-edged sword.
The internet, technology and data centres all rely on huge amounts of electricity and energy. Statistically, an alarming 3.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions are caused by our smartphones, devices, computers, and their supporting networks and systems, which is roughly on par with the emissions caused by the aviation industry. What’s more, internet emissions are predicted to double by 2025 as digital services become increasingly more available and accessible.
However, there are steps you can take to make your website inherently more eco-friendly and reduce its environmental impact. While it may be easy to think that a single website is minimal considering the billions of websites on the internet, along with the emissions of the underlying infrastructure, that should not absolve us of our responsibility to be greener if the opportunity exists. Ultimately, there are many business incentives for doing so, given that many consumers nowadays are becoming more eco-conscious and will partner with or buy from brands that exhibit good environmental practices.
That said, let’s explore some of the practical ways that growing businesses can optimise their websites for sustainability while providing a positive user experience for their audience.
Understand Your Website's Environmental Impact
Before making changes, it's helpful to get a foundational understanding of your website's current environmental impact.
You can use online tools like the Website Carbon Calculator to analyse your site and see how it measures up in terms of energy use and emissions. This top-level data will reveal the areas most needing improvement and serve as a benchmark to track your progress as you make your website more sustainable over time.
Choose a Green (and Secure) Web Hosting Provider
One of the most important decisions you can make for your website's sustainability is the hosting provider you select. Some hosting providers have been more forthcoming about their use of renewable energy and resources to power their data centres in recent years. However, if you’re based in the UK, opting for a more local hosting provider could be the best option as it uses fewer emissions to transmit data from your server to your host (and vice versa), thus minimising resource usage.
Finding a green hosting company that powers its infrastructure with 100% renewable energy sources like wind, solar, or hydroelectric power can be one of the most proactive and impactful ways to get the most out of your site’s emissions.
Ultimately, switching web hosts is a common practice among developers and site owners. When doing so, it’s important to make sure that your new host can capably and reliably host your resources, offering sufficient uptime, round-the-clock support, enterprise-grade cyber incident protection, secure infrastructure and monitoring, and more. When vetting potential hosts, be sure to ask about this, coupled with their energy collection, carbon footprint metrics, and sustainability or net zero initiatives.
Compress and Optimise Assets
Images, videos, and other multimedia elements are often large contributors to a website's carbon footprint. These files require significant server resources and energy to load, especially for users on slower internet connections.
To minimise the environmental impact of your media assets, there are a few simple ideas to adopt as part of your everyday media activities on your website. These include the following:
Compress image files using tools like TinyJPG, Squoosh, or your website's CMS media settings. Aim for file sizes under 100KB where possible.
Use the appropriate image format (JPG, PNG, or WebP) for each file to balance quality and size.
Limit the use of high-resolution images and videos to only the most critical areas of your site.
Utilise lazy loading to only load content as users scroll to that content.
Embed videos from efficient third-party platforms instead of hosting them directly.
Consider deploying a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to load cached resources for site visitors more efficiently, which can also help your site speed and sustainability goals.
By optimising your media assets, you can dramatically reduce the energy required to load your web pages while maintaining a positive and fulfilling user experience. All in all, it’s a win-win for your website and visitors.
Minimise Custom Fonts and Scripts
Similar to media files, custom fonts and third-party scripts can significantly impact your website's eco-friendliness rating. Each additional font or script adds to the overall page weight, requiring more energy to load and render for users.
As a starting point, review whether custom fonts are needed in the scheme of your overall brand identity and content strategy. It’s likely that if consulting a branding and design expert, custom fonts will have been leveraged, as using tried-and-tested fonts can appear less original to your audience, in some cases.
In such cases, review your website and work with your developer to:
Use the font weights and styles you explicitly need, avoiding excessive font files.
Limit the use of custom fonts in favour of standard web-safe options when possible.
Audit third-party scripts (analytics, ads, widgets, etc.) and remove or replace any that aren't essential.
Combine and minify CSS and JavaScript files to reduce the number of HTTP requests.
Keeping your codebase lean and efficient will pay dividends in terms of lowering your website's carbon footprint.
Automate Sustainability Monitoring
Ongoing monitoring and optimisation are essential to maintaining a sustainable website over time. Consider implementing tools and processes to automatically track your website's environmental performance and identify areas for improvement.
Alongside the aforementioned Website Carbon Calculator to track your site’s emissions, consider using Google PageSpeed Insights to evaluate your page load times and optimisation opportunities. Using a CDN and minifying files can drastically improve page speed, which is also a crucial user experience (UX) factor in this day and age. In turn, by satisfying each user request by ensuring your site loads its resources quickly (and in a more sustainable way) you’ll be on your way to creating a greener website for the long haul.
Other resources like Ecograder provide your website with a ‘score’ and recommendations to help developers understand specific ways to reduce digital emissions and adjust estimates for more traffic.
As the world becomes increasingly conscious of the need for sustainable business practices, making your website more eco-friendly should be a top priority. By implementing the strategies outlined in this guide, you will no doubt create a more sustainable and user-friendly experience, whilst empowering your site to stand out in the crowded marketplace of today.
Here at Sprout, we offer flexible finance services to SMEs with a sustainable mindset. If you’re passionate about helping people and the planet, we can offer industry experience and business advice to help you set your brand - and, by extension, your website - apart from the crowd. Start making changes today and arrange a free, no-obligation chat with our experts.