As an organisation committed to tackling the climate emergency, we were shocked to discover that our new website emitted more carbon than 74% of websites globally.
Sadly, we didn’t request a low emission website when we commissioned the work, but, alas, we cannot turn back in time. So, what could we do once our website had gone live?
Hoping that this blog may help others facing a similar challenge, here are the steps we took to reduce emissions from our website, improving its carbon rating from F to A+.
Website carbon calculator
The first step was to determine our website’s carbon footprint, which includes all the energy and emissions related to it.
Several factors affect the carbon footprint: the amount of data sent when a page loads; the energy consumed by data centres, telecom networks and user devices; the energy source the data centre uses; how clean electricity is; and how much traffic the website attracts.
The Website Carbon Calculator is a great tool to assess the carbon footprint. You simply insert the URL of a website and it calculates its emissions for you. It shows how your website compares to others worldwide and provides a carbon rating based on the factors I mentioned above – similar to how electrical appliances are rated.
The calculator also offers tips and resources of where to find more information about how to reduce website emissions, but I confess that these felt quite technical.
Seeking expertise
Faced with technical challenges beyond my expertise, I sought advice from another communications professional.
Luckily, the second University of Edinburgh’s Communications and Marketing Conference, which I attended last year, focused on sustainability, and one of the speakers talked about their own surprise discovering their website’s low carbon rating and what they did about it.
I reached out to the speaker and she was incredibly helpful, meeting me and offering excellent advice.
Other than the guidelines in the next sections, she also suggested some further tweaks like avoiding bold text and capitals. This makes the text both more accessible and the site greener.
Data centre
I had to find out what was the data centre for our website. This is important because a significant portion of the energy used by a website is used in data centres where information is stored and processed.
A quick internet search returned several platforms that help you find the hosting provider for your website – I used DomainTools.
The next question was whether the data centre was green. Our data centre was not listed on the website that details sustainable data centres (see below).
I delved into the website of our hosting provider looking for information about their sustainability strategy. While the strategy was brand new and looked great, I wasn’t sure what information I needed to assess their green credentials. How green the data centre is should be verified by an independent organisation (see below).
Data centre: Green Web Foundation
The Green Web Foundation provides a list of verified green hosting providers that have evidenced they meet the Foundation’s sustainability criteria.
Our data centre was not on the list, but upon advice, I contacted the Foundation asking whether they knew why they were not listed.
I was pleased to receive an answer the next morning. It turned out that while the data centre had previously been listed, it did not provide updated evidence to show that their services are still delivered using 100% green energy.
I did not pursue this further at that stage, but it might be a good idea to ask the company that developed your website whether they hold a relationship with the hosting provider.
Alternatively, you could follow up with the data centre to encourage them to request verification by the Green Web Foundation – it is free after all. The Foundation has a sample email template you can use to do this.
Cleaner code
The final step was the one that triggered the best outcomes for us.
I contacted the company that developed the ClimateXChange website. As advised by the communications professional I spoke with, I asked if it was possible to ensure that the code was green and clean.
In practical terms, this means that pages should take as little time as possible to load.
Your website company should know what this means but, if needed, you can be more specific and ask them to split CSS files into two: main, which are essential to all pages, and critical, which are the ones related to styling.
The company worked on this promptly, tweaked the code and the results were magic. Our website is now cleaner than 95% of all webpages globally – hurray!
