6 ways to build a sustainable website in 2023
What is a green website?
A sustainable website takes the environment, as well as your customers into account during design, development and hosting. Ensuring little to no carbon emissions are being released, whilst keeping full transparency is the aim of every web design.
Why is it so important to have a sustainable website?
- 4% of global carbon emissions are produced by digital technologies [1]
- If the internet was a country, it would rank as the world’s 6th highest polluter [2]
- Every year technology is improving and increasing causing an average increase of 9% in energy consumption [3]
- According to a sustainability and consumer behaviour report by Deloitte, nearly 1 in 3 consumers have stopped buying from brands due to sustainability concerns.[4]
So, what are the 6 ways you can start to build a green website?
- Understand your websites carbon footprint
To get a quick overview on whether or not your website has a green host you can search your URL in The Green Web Foundation’s directory. If you appear on this search, then you know that your site is being run on 100% green energy.
Check your website: www.thegreenwebfoundation.org
If you want to take a deep dive into your website’s carbon footprint, and those of your competition, then you can visit https://ecoping.earth/ Your website carbon report will include a range of insights from EcoScore and resource overview, all the way to what specific actions they would recommend.
- Choose green web hosting
One of the key ways to ensure that you have a green website is through your choice of website hosting. Luckily there are many options to choose from, one being Tweak!
https://www.tweakuk.com/pricing/hosting/#hosting
- Speed your website up
The longer your pages takes to load the more energy it consumes, resulting in higher levels of CO2 being produced. The optimum loading speed is 2.5 seconds or below and this can be achieved through various web design techniques, such as web-safe fonts, browser caching, reducing redirects and more!
- Reduce image file sizes
Images are very important to bring personality and vibrance to your website, but the more you have the more data is needed, and there is nothing worse than a slow loading image for both your audience and your carbon emissions.
- Improve site navigation to make it easy to find information
The longer your users spend on your website trying to find what they are looking for the more carbon is emitted. By ensuring that your site map is carefully planned out and you have strong call to actions, you can get your customers to be where they need to be quickly and energy efficiently.
- Check your core web vitals
Monitoring and optimising your core web vitals is not only important for your Google ranking, but also plays a part in your websites carbon footprint. To ensure that your core web vitals are performing at 100% you should follow Googles guidelines:
- Large Contentful Paint (LCP) – under 2.5 seconds
- First Input Delay (FID) – below 100ms
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – less than 0.1
[5]
Who is Tweak?
Digital marketing agency Surrey
Tweak is a personable, digital marketing agency based in Leatherhead, Surrey. Our expertise helps businesses get the best ROI from their marketing, with services including brand and website design, SEO, content creation, PPC and social campaigns. We combine all these services to create lead generation campaigns that deliver amazing results for our clients.
Find out how sustainable your website is with our free green website audit and get personalised recommendations on how you can improve for the environment and user experience!
