At Velo, we’ve conducted a study into how to make a website as sustainable as possible.
The reality is that carbon is emitted even just by hosting and serving your website. And, after all, we want people to visit our website and then engage with the content.
It is not about zero emissions; it is about doing the right thing to reduce them. There is a lot that to consider — from how it is coded to how and where its hosted. Read on to make small differences that add up to make a big impact:
Where you host matters
Perhaps one of the more overt starting points would be choosing a hosting provider that is powered by renewable energy. Ultimately, servers need power, and many get very hot and therefore needing cooling.
For many B2B marketers, this decision may be owned by the IT team, but often cloud-based hosts, like AWS, provide these options as standard — however they may come with some additional costs. For the more adventurous, there are emerging innovative options, such as Microsoft’s ocean-cooled facility, which we expect to see more of in the future.
What you host matters too
Perhaps fortunately, most factors that drive carbon emissions from your website are also factors that hamper your technical SEO performance. Over the years the decision between optimising for Google or for the people visiting your website has raged on. The approach is the same here: a compromise.
Ultimately, you are trying to reduce the file size of each page that is available. Many researchers have invented arbitrary targets of 2MB per page, but this discounts the purpose, content and length of the page.
We advocate a more pragmatic approach designed for B2B marketers who need to make a big impact. Have larger file sizes for your most high-impact pages but, for those that are less vital, we would advise you look to reduce them.
For example, don’t compromise on your home page, but for those like “meet the team”, privacy notices or individual articles in your blog, think again. These long-tail articles add up to a lot.
To reduce the carbon footprint of a page, watch out for those pesky items increasing its file size. Some might be less obvious to spot than others:
- Videos – look to stream — not download — and think about length. It might sound obvious, but a shorter video has a smaller file size. We do not advocate removing them all together, as their impact on visitors is too great to compromise.
- Images – use WebP format for images rather than JPEG on web pages to reduce the file sizes between 30%-50%. There will be no significant loss of quality but, by doing so, you will lower the carbon footprint by improving the page load speed.
- Excessive code – over the years, particularly in WordPress, code blocks can be added to your site structure in the theme. Remove commented out blocks you no longer need and minify downloadable scripts, such as CSS or JavaScript.
- Functionality – consider the interactivity in use on the page. Does it serve a purpose? Does it add to the story or the impact? Avoid animation for animation’s sake, unless you are using techniques such as GIFs.