How can a website harm the environment ?
Most people do not even ask themselves the question of the impact that a website can have on the environment. We quickly forget that the Internet uses a very large source of energy.
In reality, we have to compare our websites to cars. A car is a machine that needs gasoline as fuel to run and that's what makes it a polluting machine. In his case, the Internet is stored on millions of hard drives in large warehouses called data centers. Hard drives are stored in machines that run all day in extreme heat. All these machines are very polluting since its energy is very often supplied by a fossil fuel as for the car. And it is on several of these machines, in hard drives, that your website is stored.
What does it mean to have an eco-friendly website?
An eco-friendly website will pollute just a little bit. Follow some recommendations listed below to ensure that the website reduces its carbon footprint.
If a website produces very little CO2, it is considered to be eco-friendly.
How to reduce your carbon footprint?
There are several ways to reduce the carbon footprint of your website. Here are some ways presented below.
1. Choose green hosting
Choosing your web hosting is very important, it is the basis of the whole site. Even with a well-optimized website, the site can load very slowly if the host is poorly chosen.
Did you know that the chosen hosting has a direct impact on the performance of the site? Not only that, but performance also has an impact on the environment. The longer a site takes to load, the harder the server will work. It is therefore important, from the start, to give yourself as many chances as possible. It is for this reason that we recommend green hosts that are on the following list: The Green Web Foundation.
We have a few to recommend to you:
We also have hosts that are not on the list of green hosts but still happen to use Google Cloud servers:
Location
It doesn't matter whether the company behind the web hosting is local or from outside the country, one must above all make sure that they have data centers available locally in your region.
In our case, the majority of our clientele is in the Montreal area. If a server is in Canada, that's fine, but if they're in Canada in Montreal, that's even better. The closer a server is to the location of our customers, the faster the server response time will be.
Energy
An equally important factor in choosing a host is the energy used to keep the servers running. In our case, we are lucky to have hydroelectricity in Canada. If our server is local, it is necessarily eco-friendly due to the electricity that powers it.
The mission
Hosting can have green servers, that’s for sure. But is the mission behind the host aiming for a more sustainable future? In the hosts mentioned above, PlanetHoster, Web Hosting Canada and Google are companies that are doing their best to be eco-friendly.
2. Optimize performance
As mentioned above, performance plays an important role for the environment. The faster a site loads, the less energy it consumes. Otherwise, the longer a site takes to load, the more energy it consumes.
Several performance optimization methods can be implemented. Here are a few below.
Caching
The "caching " or "caching " is a concept that aims to remember information from a website such as images, pages and other content to prevent users from having to load all the site's files each time they browse a site. new page. Caching can be done at several levels.
Browser
For a faster internet, your browser already has a cache of its own. This layer is already self-managed for you.
CDN
A CDN cache such as Cloudflare or Fastly can allow you to have a cache of your site outside the server where your site is located. Services like these will also offer you all kinds of premium configurations to optimize performance and security.
Server
This type of caching is managed by the host used for the website. Generally, a web hosting will have its own caching system. Sometimes the server may even have a CDN included and preconfigured to give you maximum performance.
Website
On a WordPress site, like the one for Pina Data, will use a WordPress plugin to cache the pages of the site. We primarily use and recommend WP-rocket, the #1 plugin for caching in the universe WordPress.
Minification
With the implementation of computer codes, you can very quickly end up with a lot of files that can be quite large on the server. Minification is a process that compresses, in a way, and reduces the weight of the site's static files.
In these cases, it becomes essential to take the time to minify the static HTML, CSS and JavaScript files present on the site to reduce their weight on the page.
The easiest way to do this on a WordPress is to use WP-rocket. It is a WordPress caching extension, which also allows you to optimize, compress and minify site files. With a CDN such as Cloudflare, the option to minify static files is also available.
Compression photos
As we mainly take over existing websites to optimize them, we are used to very often seeing websites whose weight of images affect performance. The majority of the sites that we collect very often tell us that more than 50% of the weight of a page comes from the images alone. Simply by using image compression solutions such as TinyPNG, Imagify or ShortPixel, one can easily pick up a few seconds less to load a page.
Pre-loading
You can preload several aspects of a site. Here are some examples below.
Lazyload
It is possible to put in place a pre-loading of images, commonly called "lazyload ". This means that the image will only load if you hover over the section in which it is positioned on the page. Not only that, but we will also generally have a blurry image that will be displayed until the real image appears. This method helps to reduce the load on the server when loading a page. It should be noted that the lazyload applies not only to images, but also to any content on the site.
Pre-loading, external URLs
In a context where we recover data from external websites (e.g.: Google fonts for the loading of the fonts) for the proper functioning of our site, we will want, at that time, to preload the files. It's a bit like a caching system. Google fonts for the loading of the fonts) to the proper functioning of our website, we want to be, at this time, pre-load the files. This is a bit of a system which is similar to the caching.
3. Reduce the number of external calls
Not only can we preload external URLs that we would like to call for the display of Google fonts, for example, but we can also reduce the number of calls.
It’s a bit the same principle as when we say: “Recycling is good, but producing less waste is better”. If we have the possibility of reducing the number of calls, we will see our performance improve and thereby, we will pollute less.
4. Work with ecological platforms
At Pina Data, we do our best to be as eco-friendly as possible. For that, we sometimes have to choose to work with technologies that are eco-friendly.
When we learned, for example, that the virtual call tool Whereby had the objective of planting 1 million trees if there were a certain number of video calls that were made via their platform, we chose this product for our virtual calls rather than other solutions like Zoom or Microsoft Teams.
Regarding the technological choices used for the operation of our customers' websites, we also do our best, as far as possible, to offer green technologies. For example, we are used to work on e-commerce websites. It is certain that we very strongly recommend solutions such as Shopify that mission is to offer eco-friendly e-commerce websites.
5. Provide the delivery to be carbon neutral
The delivery of products by post can be very polluting. It is for this reason that we recommend solutions like EcoCart which take care of all the delivery aspects, ensuring that your orders are carbon neutral.
This solution is also available on the app store of Shopify.
6. Simplify the ergonomics of the website
If the site is simple to use, the user will spend less time to find the information he is looking for.
It sounds easy to say, but it is recommended that you contact experts like Pina Data to advise you of your choice in ergonomics (UI / UX) of your site.
7. Optimize the code
Reduce the amount of code, and especially improve the quality of it can help you to optimize the performance and accessibility for all of your website.
By optimizing the performance, you can reduce your carbon footprint.
And by optimizing accessibility, you will reduce friction and therefore this will potentially have the impact of also reducing your carbon footprint since the user will spend less time on your site looking for the information he wants to access.
8. Test your footprint
In order to ensure that your site is pretty optimized to be considered as eco-friendly, we invite you to generate a report via the following platforms :
These sites will generate a report of optimizations to be performed to meet the criteria that define that your website is eco-friendly.
Conclusion
The number of websites will keep increasing over time. It is therefore important that they are as less polluting as possible.
Moreover, the advice mentioned above can have a significant impact on the environment. But you still have to know how to implement all of this. Feel free to ask a web agency specialized in the matter such as Pina Data, before performing any of these optimizations.
