Top tips for a sustainable website
Your website may not be the first thing you think of when you’re considering your business’s impact on the planet. But as the climate crisis deepens, more and more agencies and businesses are looking to their digital assets to see where they could be lightening the load on the environment. After all, any time a single webpage is opened, 20 milligrams of CO2 are emitted every second – and this can rise to up to 300 milligrams for larger sites. That puts enormous pressure on an already-struggling planet.
So, how do you make your website more sustainable? Here are our top tips:
1. Images and videos
Image sizes are one of the biggest energy-zappers on any website, and they rarely, if ever, need to be as large as they often are. Optimise the images you really need on your site by reducing their resolution and image quality as much as you possibly can.
And while videos are a fantastic asset to have on any site, make sure they are embedded onto your site and aren’t set to autoplay. And only feature videos on your website if they are really needed – not just for the sake of it. Video backgrounds for example are a ‘nice to have’ but they aren’t very energy-efficient.
By optimising the images and videos on your site you’ll not only help it become more sustainable and energy-efficient, but it’ll also help to speed it up too. Win/win!
2. Delete stuff you don’t need
The chances are that, if you dig around in your media library for your site, you’ll find plenty of images and videos that you aren’t even using across your site. A spring clean around your site will prove incredibly beneficial – and don’t stop there. Also look at unused plugins, old posts you don’t need anymore… literally anything that is taking up digital space on your website.
3. Boost your site navigation
Site navigation is not just crucial for exceptional user experience, it’s also an important consideration for website sustainability, too. If your navigation is confusing and unwieldy on your website, then users will spend far longing clicking around to find what they’re looking for (either that, or they’ll abandon your site in favour of a better one).
At Studiovine, we take website sustainability very seriously. Each site we create is optimised so that it is as energy efficient as possible, thereby limiting our clients’ impact on the environment as much as we can.
If you’d like us to create a sustainable website for you, or you’d like us to make your existing site more energy-efficient, we’re just a phone call away.
