You might not think that websites and internet services use a lot of energy – but you’d be surprised to know that websites have an environmental impact.
Servers, data centres, and cooling systems all use up electricity, but these tips can help you to minimise the environmental impact of your website.
Optimise Images
High-resolution images will increase your website’s load time and increase energy consumption. This is because the larger your image files, the more data needs to be transferred and the more energy is used. Reduce your image files to help tackle this, or use images in webp format.
Setup Website Caching
Caching involves downloading shared page elements and storing them closer to the user. When they revisit the page, they can retrieve this data from the cache location rather than querying the web server again – minimising the transfer of data.
Improve Site Navigation
Good user experience makes using your website easier, and reduces the amount of energy wasted navigating to pages that don’t serve the correct purpose. To tackle this, do personal research to help set a clear, logical navigational structure.
Use a Green Web Host
A large amount of energy is used by websites in the data centre and in the transmission of data to and from the data centre. Certified green hosting providers use renewable energy to run their servers and websites.
All of the websites on Ballyhoo hosting are done so on a Certified Green Host provider.
Use Lazy Load
Lazy loading means loading images and other media only as it’s required. All elements above the fold load instantly, but the rest of the page only appears as they scroll down.
This saves on energy consumption and helps websites to load quicker.
Delete What You Don’t Need
The more streamlined your website, the less energy is used. You should carry out frequent checks of your website and delete anything you don’t use – including plugins, themes, media and images, and spam comments.
Ballyhoo are sustainable website designers and developers. We are striving to be planet friendly – from our Ecologi membership to being certified green hosts, we care about the world we live in. Contact us now to work together on your project.
