How to make your website more sustainable

Earlier this month we shared our 10 top tips for improving your digital sustainability. Today, we’re going to take a deeper dive into the impact your website can have on the planet, and how to make it more sustainable.

According to the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance, the ‘Internet contributes to 3.7% of global carbon emissions, more than aviation.’ With the average person visiting up to 130 web pages per day (Digital Silk), reducing the carbon emissions produced by each of those web pages has the potential to reduce global emissions. The Eco-Friendly Web Alliance recommend working towards a target of 1g of carbon per web page:

‘The target of 1g of carbon per web page was arrived at based on the website audits we have completed. It is considered achievable for most existing websites and serves as a practical starting point for carbon reduction efforts. Conversely, if the target were set too low, it might not drive enough change to have a meaningful impact on reducing the carbon footprint.’

But how can we achieve this target?

One of the main contributors to the total ‘weight’ of a web page is images. This guide from The Pixel Parlour (Music Mark’s website developers) provides quick tips for optimising images to streamline your website. Tips include choosing the best format (such as JPEG or WebP for saving on file size), using the ‘Save for web’ option when exporting images from editing software, and applying optimisation. These will create faster loading times as well as saving energy, consequently improving the experience for people visiting your website.

Other quick actions (as suggested by Wholegrain Digital, who have a whole guide for businesses to do a ‘Digital Declutter’) include reducing animation on your web pages and switching videos to ‘play on demand’ rather than automatically playing when the page opens. You should also ensure navigation is intuitive to reduce the number of clicks a user has to do to find the content they’re looking for, so people aren’t loading pages unnecessarily.

Photo by Zbynek Burival on Unsplash

Although it isn’t such a quick change, one of the most effective ways you can improve the impact of your website is switching to green hosting. This ensures that the data centres powering your website are using clean, green energy, and reduces the emissions linked to your website. The Green Web Directory provides a list of verified green hosting providers to help you make the switch.

If you’re thinking about creating a new website for yourself or a small organisation, why not try out Fast Familiar’s free digital climate action site builder? This tool, currently a prototype, helps you build a website without any carbon footprint.

Changes to Music Mark’s Website

As part of Music Mark’s own sustainability journey, we’ve worked with our website development partner, The Pixel Parlour, to make a number of changes to our website to reduce its impact as far as possible. This includes:

• Hosting the website in a UK-based datacenter.
• Streamlining the codebase to reduce the total amount of computing power required to load each page, at your end and ours.
• Optimising images and other static assets to reduce the amount of bandwidth used when you browse the site.
• Implementing caching policies that further reduce the load on the web server, and help repeat pages load faster using less energy.

These changes have greatly reduced the impact of our website. Initially we focused our efforts on the most visited pages, but across the site we found savings to reduce the weight of each page load by an average of 21%. Combined with the additional caching, across the year this has reduced the actual bandwidth per visitor by more than 30%.

The Eco-Friendly Web Alliance provide a free website audit so you can find out how much carbon your website produces, and free guidance on how to improve. You can also try out the Carbon Calculator tool – we use this on our This Is Not A Rehearsal web page to test the carbon produced by each view of the page, which currently produces 0.22g of CO2 per view, which is cleaner than 77% of pages tested.

Don’t forget to visit the This Is Not A Rehearsal webpage to explore more news, training & events, resources and research to support you on your sustainability journey. If you’d like to stay up to date with training and resources related to the climate crisis within the music education sector, click here to sign up for our ‘This Is Not A Rehearsal’ monthly newsletter.