We believe that the Internet is intangible and ecologically clean. However, energy consumption and Internet emissions are enormous.
Today, the internet would not exist if the electricity was not there.
Used to power data centers, the devices we use to surf the web, but also telecommunications networks, the global internet uses more electricity than the whole of the UK.
This translates into a lot of carbon emissions. You should know that 2% of carbon emissions worldwide come from the electricity used by the Internet. This equals the amount of carbon from the global aviation industry, which most people think is one of the worst polluting industries. If the Internet were a country, it would be the sixth in the ranking of the worst polluters in the world, on a par with Germany.
Unlike many other industries that target efficiency and reduce emissions, the Internet industry is set to continue growing in the years to come. Internet access around the world is increasing, and as data becomes faster and cheaper, we demand more.
Streaming services like YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify use a lot of data and grow at high speed, even ordinary websites require more data.
The Internet could over the next 10 years account for 3.5% of global carbon emissions.
The urgency was underscored by Thomas Stocker, one of the world’s greatest climate scientists. He stated :
“The year 2020 is of major importance. If CO2 emissions continue to rise beyond this date, the most ambitious mitigation targets will become unachievable.” (Source: M2020)
That is why as web designers, developers and website owners, we need to find out what can be done to reduce the emissions from our websites.
But above all, we need to understand three simple principles:
1. It is impossible to manage things that are not measurable.
2. Data transfer consumes electricity, so reducing data transfer will reduce energy and emissions.
3. Renewable energy is the future because it produces far fewer emissions than other sources of energy.
HOW TO MEASURE A WEBSITE’S CARBON EMISSIONS?
It is very difficult to improve something that you cannot measure and until recently it was almost impossible to know what the emissions could be from a website.
Fortunately, this is now possible using the free website CO2 estimation tool on WebsiteCarbon.com . This tool provides data on CO2 emissions per page view, annual CO2 emissions, annual energy consumption and whether or not the website is hosted in a data center powered by renewable energy.
Using this tool, it is possible to compare your own website to your competitors and set carbon reduction targets for yourself.
This tool reveals the following facts:
An average website produces 6.8 grams of CO2 per page viewed. It may not sound like much, but if an average website has traffic equivalent to 10,000 page views per month, then it would produce about 816 kg of CO2 per year. For information, a flight London – Tokyo consumes less CO2.
HOW TO REDUCE DATA TRANSFER FROM A WEBSITE?
First, we need to reduce the weight (in KB) of the web pages of our websites.
Smaller pages have many additional benefits, such as significantly faster load times, which improves user experience and SEO.
Here are some simple steps we can take to reduce page weight:
- In order to reduce the carbon footprint of a site, writing code cleanly and efficiently is essential.
- Using vector graphics and CSS effects to create an engaging visual experience is recommended. The files used will be much smaller than traditional images such as JPEG and GIF.
- Downloading images to scale is preferable rather than relying on CSS to resize them.
- We can offload large media to environmentally friendly third party suppliers.
- It is necessary to compress the files, images and videos in order to reduce the size of these without visible loss of quality. This tips can easily reduce a web page by more than 90% of its weight!
- The suppression of the automatic reading of the videos, allows a saving of data.
- We can minimize custom fonts, which can represent a large proportion of the overall page size.
- We may decide to no longer support older browsers such as Internet Explorer 8 and to use only modern web fonts, such as WOFF and WOFF2 which use higher compression methods.
- Reduce tracking and advertising scripts, which consume a lot of data and rarely bring value to the user.
- Instantly delete the current version of a web page with mobile solutions like AMP.
Implementing a caching solution is also very important. Caching is the process of storing the resources of a request, and of reusing those resources for subsequent requests. Basically, it reduces the amount of server bandwidth required to generate a page view by storing static resources external to the host.
The second thing to do to reduce data transfer is to reduce the number of times our pages are loaded.
Reducing traffic can be a good idea, as the reasons for doing so are beneficial to the website owner and the user.
Even if we assume that the traffic is good, it is possible that Internet users visit pages that are not useful to them. The bounce rate makes it possible to highlight these statistics, which show the number of visitors who realize that they have loaded a wrong page or a page that does not make sense with the search carried out.
Streamlining user journeys, allowing users to find the information they want in fewer steps, helps reduce the bounce rate. This means that even with fewer page views, a website can provide the same level of value.
In simple terms, the data transfer from a website is equal to the average weight of the pages multiplied by the number of page views. Reducing the weight of pages and especially unwanted pages are two very effective ways to reduce website emissions while improving the overall user experience.
HOW TO TURN YOUR WEBSITE INTO RENEWABLE ENERGY?
According to an ACEEE study, the energy used by the Internet (and therefore a website) breaks down roughly as 48% used in the data center, 14% used in the telecommunications network and 38% used on the end-user device.
Of course, this will vary for each website and each user, but this represents a typical scenario.
As a website owner, it is difficult, if not impossible, to control the energy used by telecommunications networks or end users. However, you can have some control over the energy used by the data center by simply choosing the right host .
Most hosts use electricity from the standard grid and often have little knowledge of where their energy comes from. There are a growing number of hosting providers who are actively purchasing renewable energy for their data centers and, therefore, have much lower carbon emissions.
It can be difficult to identify the hosts that use green energy and in general, it is better to ask them directly for proof if they use renewable energies in their data centers. The Green Web Foundation has a very good database of hosting providers who claim to use green energy, although it should be noted that it is still worth checking out directly.
Unlike reducing data transfer, switching to a green host does not require any modification of the website itself and can be done quickly and easily, which allows us to significantly reduce our website emissions with a minimum of hassle. Going to a green web host is the easiest way to reduce website emissions.
3 SIMPLE STEPS TO REDUCE EMISSIONS
We can now see that there are tangible, and in many simple cases, steps we can take to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions on the websites we operate.
- Compare carbon emissions from our website.
- Reduce data transfer by reducing page weight and unnecessary page views.
- Switch to a host powered by renewable energy.
If we follow all of these steps, we can transform our industry and create a truly clean, carbon-neutral network. A low carbon website is a real win-win for website owners, web users and the environment.
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