Page Weight
We all like to make our sites as pretty and as fancy as possible, with big beautiful images and stunning video, however this all adds to the weight of your web pages. Not only does page weight affect the performance of your website, but also increases the amount of carbon required to power and deliver that page to every user that interacts with it.
There are 3 basic steps to calculating how ‘heavy’ your page should be including:
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Looking at benchmarks in your industry and your existing website
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Estimating the worst connection of your target audience and their expectations on load times
- Trusting your gut instincts - if you think it’s too much, it probably is.
To help reduce this weight, make sure you’re reducing your image file sizes and consider embedding video via YouTube rather than directly on to your site. After all, this will increase your page speed, which in turn can improve your SEO, user experience and conversion rate.
Green Hosting
Web hosting is the process of renting or buying space for a website on the internet. As all websites require hosting, you could use a web hosting service that utilises green energy and renewable sources to power their servers. This is a simple way to improve the sustainability of your website and is something we strive to offer with our hosting packages. This means that from the get go, you’re already using a foundation for your website that isn’t detrimental to the environment.
Carbon Offsetting
Once you’ve tested and reduced how much carbon your website uses, you could try using a carbon offsetting partner to offset the remaining carbon emissions. For example, planting trees or supporting renewable energy projects. With our Clear site as it currently stands, we’d need to plant 2 trees per year to absorb the carbon 10,000 monthly visitors produce.
You can check how much carbon it takes to run your website here.
Search Engine Optimisation is sustainable
As a digital agency, we know the importance of good SEO for your site. When we take on projects, we have some best practice SEO already built in to ensure that your website is on its way building good authority and ranking on the search engine results page (SERP).
SEO can help grow your audience but also helps internet users find the good quality information they are looking for quicker and more efficiently. Good SEO also takes into consideration page speeds, which we mentioned earlier and we run regular speed audits taking a look at minimising scripts and reducing image sizes as well as other technical optimisations.
Check Your Plug-ins and Scripts
Have you ever checked to see if all of the plugins and modules for your site are still relevant, efficient and fit for purpose? Having too many modules on your site can cause issues with loading speeds and if it’s something you don’t even need or isn’t right for your site any more, then consider changing it up!
On a technical level, looking at the sustainability of your plug-ins and scripts that you run on site is a really important tool to optimise your site in an eco-conscious way. Plus, if it’s a paid for module that you just don’t need any more, you can save yourself some money whilst making efforts to save the planet too.
There are many other ways you can look at your site to decrease its carbon footprint and these are just a few. If you’re looking to improve the eco-friendliness of your website or have any questions, get in touch to see how we can help!
