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Did you know that all our digital activities â from sending an email to sharing a video or updating our website â have an environmental impact (known as “digital pollution”)?
Unless youâre planning on going off-grid and relying on carrier pigeons for all your marketing output, itâs v tricky to 100% avoid adding to that pollution. However, there are loads we can do to reduce our negative impact, and eco-friendly web design is a great place to start.
If you need a new website and sustainability is important to you, but the thought of DIYing it is making your head feel like it might explode, take a look at our stress-free, value-packed Squarespace website packages.
The Sustainable Web Manifesto has six key principles for creating a more sustainable digital landscape. You can sign up to the manifesto and read the policies in more detail, but if youâre more of a TLDR person, these are the positive actions we all need to take to make the web a greener place:
In real-world places, like houses and offices, itâs relatively easy to picture how we can be more environmentally friendly: recycle, reuse, turn things off⌠you know the drill. But when thereâs no physical stuff to sort out and the lights are technically always on, what does eco-friendly web design actually mean?
For websites, a lot of it comes down to energy, in particularâŚ
The energy consumption of our collective online activity is obviously MASSIVE. In fact, if the Internet were a country, it would be the sixth biggest consumer of electricity, sitting in between Japan and Brazil. Environmental agencies also estimate it would be the fourth-largest polluter in the world.
That pollution doesnât just come from power consumption but from the environmental impact of all the other resources needed to keep us online. For example, digital communications, like sending emails, DMs or Slack messages, also use a huge amount of water, because they all need to go through data centres. Data centres produce a lot of heat â think about how hot a laptop can get when youâre doing an intensive task â and theyâre cooled using our old friend H20.
To give you a visual of just how much water is needed to keep us online, Microsoftâs latest sustainability report revealed that its water consumption jumped by 34% between 2021 and 2022 to around the volume of 2,500 Olympic swimming pools đ˛
If you knew you wanted to get better with money, youâd probably start by taking stock of what you already had. Even if youâre scared that youâre quite deep into your overdraft, the only way to find out is by checking your bank balance. Similarly, to make your website more eco-friendly, youâll need to know where youâre starting from. Weâve found two really helpful carbon calculator tools for doing just thatâŚ
[As with most free online rating tools, the results from these sites are estimates, rather than hard-and-fast measurements, but they’re still useful as general guidance]
Donât be downhearted if your score is bad â this also isnât meant to be a biodegradable stick to beat yourself with. The fact that youâre even checking is a great first step! Keep a note of where youâre starting from so you can track your score increasing as you make sustainability-focused updates to your site.
If youâre looking for a speedy way to fix a bad eco-friendly grade, book a VIP website day and weâll get your site to the top of the class in a flash đ
There are lots of small but impactful changes that you can implement to make your website more energy-efficient and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. Along with contributing to broader sustainability goals, lots of these changes are also good for your website’s overall user experience.
Your website needs energy to run â especially to power where your website data is stored (or âhostedâ). As we mentioned above, these data centres use a lot of power, so choosing an eco-friendly hosting company to look after your website is a good green strategy.
According to Ecograder, choosing a web host that powers its servers with renewable energy can reduce your digital product or service’s environmental impact by an estimated 15%.
Some website builders, like WordPress, allow you to choose where your website is hosted. This means you can pick an eco-friendly hosting company, but with that comes the added stress of managing the technical side yourself.
With that in mind, we’ve recently switched to Krystal for our hosting, which is 100% renewably powered from the sun, wind and sea. They also plant a tree each month for every active client on their books, and are aiming to plant or protect one billions trees by 2030.
If you’d like to give Krystal a try, you can use our referral code GOODEGG to get ÂŁ15 off. Just enter the code at checkout, when you’re placing an order for web hosting.
All-in-one DIY website builders, like Wix and ShowIt, give you less choice over hosting â you get what youâre given basically â but that also means less for you to worry about. They generally donât prioritise sustainability, but itâs worth having a snoop through their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting to find out what theyâve actually committed to.
Are you in need of a sustainable website for your biz? Our Squarespace website packages include copy, SEO, and eco-friendly web design and will have you online in less than eight weeks.
When your car is very full, it uses more fuel. Similarly, if your website is very resource-heavy (lots of large images and videos, big plugins, etc.), it needs more energy to host it and also more energy for Internet users to view it.
A big website will also have a big load time, and you’ll know from personal experience that no one likes slow loading times. They have such a negative impact on website users, in fact, that 40% would abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load (Kissmetric).
Here are a few ways you can lower the resource usage of your site:
Even if you’re not in a position to make any changes to your website, here are a few other ideas for sustainable web practices that you can incorporate into the day-to-day of your business.
Weâve talked about ways your website is using energy, but thereâs a great way that your website can help you save energy too.
Looking at digital carbon emissions, an email without attachments produces 2-3 grams of CO2 (depending on whether you’re viewing it on a computer or a phone), while an email with attachments produces 50g.
If you replace an attachment with a link to your website, that will massively reduce the carbon footprint of the email. You could do this by making a page on your website to replace a PDF brochure, or having an online client area for people to log in and see information about your business.
On a similar note, reducing the number of emails you receive will have a positive impact on your carbon footprint. Reading and storing emails both have a carbon cost â it’s not huge, but it can soon mount up, and it’s a straightforward issue to tackle. Plus, it has the added benefit of making your inbox feel less overwhelming.
An easy place to start is by unsubscribing from unwanted newsletters. Next time one lands in your inbox, here are a few signs that you should unsubscribe…
You could also search for the word “unsubscribe” in your inbox and see what comes up.
And if you know you’re never going to refer to an email again, delete it. It uses power to host it and adds unnecessarily to your digital footprint.
If youâre looking for a newsletter youâll definitely want to read, sign up for The Highly Emotional Business Owner. Weâre obviously biased, but our readers think itâs pretty dreamy, too!
TL;DR: Donât ask ChatGPT something you could very easily Google, and hiring a real-life photographer or copywriter to make things for you is a greener choice.
Artificial intelligence will have a significant negative impact on energy consumption. And, as AI is integrated even further into daily life, a BBC News report suggests that its energy consumption could be comparable to that of the Netherlands by 2027.
According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), ChatGPT uses almost 10 times the amount of energy as a Google search. And if youâre creating something using generative AI, like an image, the energy use is even higher. According to the excellently named study âPower Hungry Processing: âĄď¸Watts âĄď¸ Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?â, making one image with AI uses the same amount of energy as fully charging a mobile phone.
As weâve discussed in our article about AI and copywriting, artificial intelligence is a complicated subject with a whole range of ethical considerations to take into account. We know there are a lot of valuable use cases for it, so this isnât us telling you not to use it, but, in terms of sustainability, maybe use it sparingly.
If figuring out how to do all this yourself feels a bit overwhelming, we can help! Get in touch for a full eco-friendly web design audit, complete with an easy-to-follow to-do list.
The digital landscape doesn’t have to be an energy-hungry wasteland. If you’re keen to implement a sustainability strategy for your digital presence, there are lots of straightforward changes that you can make to aid in sustainability efforts.
Being environmentally friendly can look like using a green energy supplier, adopting good content management practices, and prioritising energy efficiency in your online activities. And the bonus is that lots of elements of sustainable website design also help provide an optimal user experience, so it’s a win-win.
If you’re running a business and want to improve the sustainability performance of your site, we’ve put together a free, non-judgy training video on ‘How To Be An Environmentally Responsible Website Owner’.
In it, we talk about:
If all of that feels a bit much, Good Egg can help! Making business websites more eco-friendly is our love language, and we have a few packages that do exactly that:
đ 1:1 Website Support Day (for existing websites) â book a full, uninterrupted day of our Holly’s time to get your websiteâs sustainability up to scratch before you log off for the day. See how we can help.
đť Squarespace Website Packages (if you need a new website) â a shiny new website complete with SEO, original copy, and all our eco-friendly web design knowledge, all for ÂŁ1,450. Find out more about the package.
Got questions about eco-friendly web design that we havenât answered in this article? Pop us a message or better yet, schedule a free 15-minute call to pick our brains!
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