[UPDATED] How to Build Sustainable Websites For Your Business

Every website on the internet emits 20 milligrams of carbon per second — the equivalent of what 13 trees can absorb in a year. Complex sites are even worse because they produce about  100 milligrams per second or more.

Being part of the SME sector, you‘re one of the driving forces of the global economy. Make use of such a big influence to promote sustainability and huge environmental impact.

Here’s how you can create energy-efficient websites to reduce carbon footprint, and of course, prepare it for earth hour 2022! 

5 Ways to Build Sustainable Websites

1. Use the right web hosting service

All website sustainability tips out there are helpful. But without the foundation of a solid web host, they won’t be as impactful. 

Many discount hosting facilities don’t have their own data centres. As a result, the energy consumption is multiplied as the website data is routed and stored in multiple channels. 

Using a hosting service with their own data centres reduces energy consumption. This is on top of getting efficient performance and security benefits. All these benefits are magnified when you take advantage of dedicated servers that promote the highest levels of efficiency. 

2. Optimise images and videos

People love visuals.  

That’s why images and videos are integrated more into websites. They make your website look good, which encourages conversion. However, they’re not great for your site’s performance and efficiency. 

Too many images and videos on your website increase load-time and energy consumption. You can compress them to reduce file size – don’t worry, you don’t need to sacrifice quality. 

Optimise images

Most pictures only need to be around 1000 pixels. You’ll need to go a little larger for banners, but blog posts can use even smaller sizes. 

Also, no need to use fancy editing software. You can resize images on your device or online using free tools like TinyPNG. 

Optimise videos

You can lower the resolution to the necessary size your website can display for videos. Or you can embed them and disable autoplay. 

Another tip is to resize your videos for mobile devices. You can prepare multiple versions of your video files and adapt them to your visitors' most common screen sizes. 

3. Enable Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is another optimisation technique. It means your site only loads media when it’s required. 

To expand, everything above the fold loads as usual when a user lands on your website. But all the content below only appears as a user scrolls down. 

This is helpful for ecommerce sites with long pages since they often have hundreds of images to load every time. 

This reduces energy consumption while helping sites load faster – which is a bonus for your SEO! 

4. Configure website caching

Caching allows users to store data for reuse. When you visit your favourite sites, they load more quickly than ones you’ve never been to before. 

Unless you clear your browsing data, you can revisit cached data from the storage location on the local device rather than requesting it from the webserver again, minimizing how much information needs to be transferred.  

Plus, it lessens energy consumption! 

5. Do a regular spring cleaning

Websites naturally expand over time. But there may be things you no longer need. Go through this checklist and delete anything over six months old:

• Previous themes
• Unused plug-ins
• Blog post revisions
• Broken links
• Unused media
• Old categories and tags
• Spam comments

While doing this, overhaul your site’s organization. Make sure the site flows coherently from page to page. This not only reduces energy consumption but also improves user experience.

Paint your website green

It starts with you. 

Help promote positive environmental change by reducing your website’s carbon emissions. Building sustainable web designs also show your commitment to your customers. 

Build your company brand, increase site performance, and improve SEO while reducing your carbon footprint. How can it get better than that?