A website often serves as the first point of contact between a business and its potential customers. For eco-friendly companies, this digital presence offers a unique opportunity to demonstrate sustainability principles beyond just products or services.
The Environmental Impact of Websites
Many people are surprised to learn that websites have a carbon footprint. Every time a page loads, it requires energy to power the servers, network, and device displaying the content. While the impact of a single page view might seem negligible, when multiplied by millions of views across the internet, it becomes significant.
Based on data by HTTP Archive, the average web page size in 2012 was 803 KB for desktop sites and 386 KB for mobile sites compared to 2022, which is 2,284 KB for desktop sites and 2,010 KB for mobile sites.
As much of the world has enjoyed faster internet access, so the use of images and video has increased, resulting in the size of web pages increasing by 184% for desktop sites and a huge 420% for mobile sites in the period between 2012 and 2022.
Sustainable web design aims to minimise the impact of a websites carbon footprint, and there are various strategies you can take to do this:
- Optimising images, video and code
- Developing with a ‘mobile-first’ approach to reduce data transfer – only serving images with a size that reflects the device size (no one needs a high-res jpg when looking at it on a 3 inch screen)
- Using SVG wherever possible. SVG is vector images made in code, so is extremely light-weight and always perfect resolution.
- Using (raster) images and video sparingly. Focusing on typography can help to reduce the reliance on video.
- Choosing a environmentally sound server to host your data
- Choosing light-weight framework for your website and CMS. There’s no need to serve a 4mb javascript file so you can use React for your blog. The technical debt of these frameworks includes the size of the files.
For eco-friendly businesses in Bristol and beyond, adopting sustainable web design practices is both an environmental choice and a smart business move. It showcases a holistic commitment to sustainability, boosting credibility with environmentally conscious consumers. As an added benefit, these practices often enhance site performance and user experience, which can improve search engine rankings and conversion rates.
If you’re looking to create a new website and it’s environmental impact is an important factor, get in touch and I’d be happy to advise
