The Environmental Impact of Websites: Why SMEs Should Care
Websites account for a big chunk of global carbon emissions, and small, medium and even start-up and micro businesses have a chance to reduce their website’s environmental impact, improve performance and cut costs.
Find out why optimising your website for sustainability matters and how it can benefit your bottom line.
Key takeaways
Internet carbon footprint accounts for 3.7% of global emissions, comparable to the aviation industry, and will account for up to 20% of the world’s electricity consumption and 5.5% of global carbon emissions by 2025.
Small businesses can make a big difference. With over 1,000,000 content management websites run by UK businesses alone, there’s a lot of opportunity to make a positive change.
The average unoptimised website with 10,000 monthly pageviews can produce 220kg+ of CO2 per year – the same as driving about 600 miles in an average car.
Reducing your website’s carbon footprint can save costs, improve website performance and enhance brand reputation.
Simple changes like optimising hosting and reducing image sizes can make a big impact on your website’s carbon footprint.
In today’s digital world it’s easy to forget the environmental impact of our business digital marketing, especially a website. Every company website has a carbon footprint – sometimes a big one – which has real-world consequences.
For small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), understanding and addressing this impact is not only a matter of environmental responsibility but a smart business move. In this article, we’ll look at why the environmental impact of websites matters for SMEs and how taking action can benefit your business and the planet.
Website Carbon Emissions, really?
Websites may seem intangible, but they have a very tangible carbon footprint. Every time someone visits a website, data is transferred between servers, data centres and user devices – all of which consume energy to move data and display your website. This energy consumption is part of a website’s digital footprint.
Data centres which host websites require vast amounts of electricity not only to power servers but also to keep them cool – making them a big contributor to global carbon emissions. In fact, the I nternet as a whole accounts for 3.7% of global greenhouse gas emissions – the same as the aviation industry and is on track to account for 20% of the world’s electricity consumption.
Your website might be responsible for the same emissions as a family car driving hundreds of miles each year.
Using green energy for hosting websites can significantly reduce carbon emissions by relying on renewable energy sources, but this is only the first step in reducing their impact.
Why Should You Care?
Research shows that consumers favour businesses that are committed to sustainability.
To put a website’s carbon emissions into perspective, the average unoptimised website with 10,000 monthly pageviews produces ~220kg of CO2 per year—the same as driving about 600 miles in an average car or a round-trip flight from London to Paris. If you have a high-traffic website, this figure can be significantly more.
As awareness of environmental issues grows, consumers are favouring businesses that show they care about sustainability. Similarly, businesses — and likely your customers — are making sustainability a key part of their procurement process.
To understand the emissions of your website, it’s helpful to look at the key components that make up your website’s footprint:
- Data Centres: Data centres are physical buildings that house the servers that run your website. These centres consume a lot of electricity to power the servers and to keep them cool. Data centres are a big part of website emissions and inefficient ones use even more energy.
- Data Transfer: Every time someone interacts with your website data is transferred from the data centre to their device. Larger websites with unoptimised images, videos and bloated code require more energy to transfer and therefore more emissions.
- User Devices: The devices used to view your website also contribute to emissions. The more complex and resource-hungry your website the more energy it requires for devices to load and display your content.
By optimising your website, you can reduce these emissions and make your online presence more sustainable, and in doing so your website will be faster, rank better in search, be more secure and easier to use for all users. It should also be cheaper to maintain over time and show your customers you care about sustainability.
The Benefits go far beyond going green
- Brand Reputation and Differentiation: Showing environmental responsibility enhances your brand reputation, attracts eco-conscious customers and improves relationships with suppliers. This can also be beneficial during procurement processes as larger companies and government entities favour suppliers with strong sustainability credentials.
- SEO Benefits: Google likes faster better optimised websites. By improving load speed and user experience, you can boost your search engine ranking and get more organic traffic and visibility.
- Reduced maintenance costs: Optimising your website reduces long-term maintenance costs as efficient code is easier and cheaper to manage. This means SMEs can focus on growth not troubleshooting.
- Enhanced Security: By updating your website regularly and optimising the code you reduce security vulnerabilities and your website is less likely to be targeted by hackers. This helps maintain customer trust, especially for SMEs that handle customer data.
- Improved User Experience (UX): A well-optimised website loads faster so users have a better experience. Faster websites have lower bounce rates and higher engagement which is especially important to meet the high expectations of modern customers (Google Research on Page Speed).
- Performance and Uptime: Sustainable practices reduce downtime and optimise server resources so your website is available during peak times.
- Compliance and Future-Proofing: Optimising for sustainability means your SME is ready for future regulations around digital carbon footprints so you can stay ahead of the curve.
Example: Regular website updates and optimisations can reduce the need for major website overhauls every few years, saving upward of £1,000 for smaller businesses.
What SMEs Can Do: Practical Steps
Quick Wins
- Estimate website emissions: Many free calculators are available online, which will give you an indication of your website’s emissions and where to focus changes.
- Website Hosting: One of the simplest things you can do, and the first step in this journey, is to choose a green hosting provider. These providers use renewable energy to power their data centres and often reduce the carbon footprint of your website by 10-30% (Green Web Foundation).
- Reduce Image Sizes: Compress images before uploading to your website to reduce the amount of data to be loaded. There are many tools and plugins that can do this for you.
More Advanced Tasks
- Coding and caching: Use efficient coding practices and leverage caching to reduce data transfer, which in simple terms means making your website work less hard and not re-load data from the server on every page refresh. Tools like Google PageSpeed Insights can help you identify areas to improve.
- Content Delivery Network (CDN): A CDN stores copies of your website on servers around the world so data doesn’t have to travel as far to reach your users. This not only speeds up load times but also reduces the energy required to deliver your content.
Ongoing Tasks
- Website Audits: Conduct regular audits of your website to ensure it remains optimised for performance and sustainability. Use GTmetrix to monitor and improve your website’s energy efficiency.
- Update Content and Code: Keep your website’s content and code up to date. Outdated scripts slow down your site and increase energy consumption.
Frequently Asked Questions about Sustainable Website Practices
- What is green hosting? Green hosting refers to web hosting services that use renewable energy to power their servers, reducing the carbon footprint of hosted websites.
- Is it expensive to optimise my website to be sustainable? Not necessarily. Green hosts are as competitive as others, and if you have the skills or resources, there are free tools to tick off the quick wins of optimising your website. Where it becomes more expensive is if you start paying more than one supplier to analyse, audit and improve your website on an ongoing basis.
- How does a sustainable website impact SEO? A sustainable website tends to have better performance metrics, such as faster load times and improved user engagement, which Google factors into its search rankings. By optimising your website for sustainability, you are also indirectly improving its SEO.
- How do I know if my website is sustainable? You can use tools like Website Carbon Calculator or Beacon to measure the carbon footprint of your website and identify areas for improvement.
Website Sustainability Checklist
If you’re just starting out on your digital sustainability journey, these are the main actions to take to reduce your website’s carbon emissions before you consider offsetting. Or, if you’re working with a developer or specialist, these are the questions you’d want to ask them to make sure they know what they are doing 😉
- Understand the carbon emissions of your website and create a plan to reduce as much as possible, while improving performance.
- Your website is hosted by a provider powered by certified renewable energy.
- Media files are compressed and optimised in modern file formats such as webp.
- File caching is enabled to reduce data transfer.
- Scripts are minimised, and no unused files are loaded.
- A content delivery network (CDN) is in place to improve delivery to global website visitors.
- Accessibility and performance are priorities over fancy interactions in UX reviews.
- Performance tracking include sustainability metrics.
- Your website is kept up to date e.g. plugins, scripts and core updates.
- Integrated third-party tools such as analytics, ads and email are being assessed for feature value vs. emissions impact.
These basics will give you significant savings with no changes to your website.
But our website is a small part of our business’s carbon footprint?!
A website can be a small part of a business’s carbon footprint (and sometimes actually a lot more than you’d think), but it is also an integral sales tool and customer touchpoint — often the first point of contact; your shop window. So, not optimising your website for sustainability, especially when it’s also one of the lower-effort tasks with quick and longer-term wins, signals to your customers and suppliers that you’re not serious about sustainability. Aside from this, a climate-optimised website is a high-performing website, which makes greening your website a no-brainer.
If you’d like to understand more about climate optimising your website and digital marketing, speak to your supplier, or contact EasyGreen — we make it easy for businesses to green their website and improve performance, with low, transparent and predictable costs that avoid the typical bloated service charges for auditing, supporting you and maintaining your website.
Our mission is to help 1000 businesses run climate-optimised websites that are faster and cheaper to run within the next three years. We know that sustainable options will only prevail if they become more attractive, which we’ve achieved with EasyGreen.