How to reduce your website’s carbon footprint

We all need to make a dedicated effort to reduce our carbon footprint, so discover how to lower your website’s carbon footprint in this blog post.

The Internet’s carbon footprint is something we tend to overlook. Yes, we know the importance of lowering our use of plastic and cutting down on paper. But have you ever considered the carbon footprint your website is responsible for? Below, we will take a look at sustainable website design in further detail so you can get a better understanding. 

The environmental cost of a website

A lot of people do not consider the environmental cost associated with their website. Considerable amounts of energy are needed for digital content storage, transferring content from a data warehouse, and so on. The energy required to view a single webpage is small, yet there are 4.1 billion Internet users, so you can see how this accumulates to something significant. 

How can you reduce your website’s carbon footprint?

So, what steps can you take to lower the environmental impact of your website? Let’s take a look at some of the different options available:

Remove content that no longer serves a purpose

It is important to audit the content on your website regularly so you can determine whether it is delivering on strategy or not. If it is not, you may want to consider deleting the page or amalgamating it with another page. You can take a similar approach when it comes to the images on your website. Are they serving a purpose or would it be better to delete them? Perhaps they could simply do with being optimized? 

Use the correct HTML markup

Using the right HTML markup, with meaningful lists, headings, and title tags, will help to make sure that your site can be navigated while using a screen reader while also making sure that search engines are able to index your site with ease.

Reduce the file size of your website pages

Next, it is important to make sure you use the appropriate file formats and compress images so that you can lower the file size of your website pages. This will enhance the user experience of your website, as it will load a lot quicker. 

Perfect your SEO efforts

If you focus on building an effective search engine optimisation strategy, viewers will be able to find the exact website page they are looking for with ease. This prevents people from needing to look through a number of pages in order to get to where they really want to be. Not only will this reduce carbon footprint but it will make the experience better for viewers as well. 

Closing thoughts

There are multiple other ways you can reduce your carbon footprint, such as caching and using it effectively and streamlining the code of your site, ensuring it’s not overly cluttered to decrease the sizes of your files.

Any or all of these alterations to your site, will not only improve your carbon footprint, it will also give your users a much more pleasant session when they go to your website. Enhancing your content and making your business more appealing.