Understanding and reducing our digital footprint

Whenever a person accesses a website in their browser, a server somewhere processes and sends out the required bits of information, which travel across the internet and then get processed and displayed on the user’s device. Every step of that journey uses a certain amount of energy, depending on what the website contains, how far the data travels, etc. In the grand total of internet traffic, many small “amounts of energy” add up to a vast sum.

“The Cloud now has a greater carbon footprint than the airline industry. A single data center can consume the equivalent electricity of 50,000 homes. At 200 terawatt hours (TWh) annually, data centers collectively devour more energy than some nation-states.”

As the quote suggests, there’s more to consider than just visiting websites: making video calls, downloading files from the cloud or streaming a Netflix movie. But let's try to focus and look at websites for now. We are probably not all cloud providers, but almost everyone has a website – and therefore a concrete opportunity to have a direct influence.

To determine a website’s footprint, the first thing to look at is its size – the amount of data that needs to be transferred to each and every visitor. This depends largely on the content of the page. Text makes little difference, but images or even video do.

Obviously, it doesn’t make much sense to stop using images or video, but there is some good news. In recent years, we’ve seen a lot of technological progress with new high-compression image formats (such as AVIF) that help reduce file sizes dramatically without compromising on quality. Cool!

However, it seems that most website owners don’t (want to) use technological advances to create a faster, lighter experience. Instead, we see a trend towards bloating page sizes with countless Javascript tracking tools and other junk.

😱 In the last decade, the average (mobile!) website size has grown from 561KB to 2.2 MB (source).

Obviously, this doesn’t help to reduce energy consumption for traffic and hosting.

Taking action

Let’s not be part of that irresponsible mainstream trend. Let’s be responsible – getting started isn’t so hard.

• Switch to a green hosting provider if you haven’t already.
  This will ensure that a significant proportion of the energy used by your website is not actively contributing to carbon emissions. The Green Web Foundation offers both a checker and a directory of green web hosts.
• Asses your website’s current carbon footprint
  Our tool of choice is the original Website Carbon Calculator. Don’t forget: This is not a one-off exercise, so measure regularly to track your progress.
• Clean up your content
  Take a look at your current website and see what really needs to be there – and what can actually be removed. Does that generic stock image add any real value to the press release? Do you need all those tracking scripts? Which low traffic pages can you get rid of altogether?
• Compress your images
  We love using ImageOptim to manually optimise all images before we upload them. There are also a plenty web-based alternatives like Compressor, and if you’re on Wordpress, Smush might be a good option.

This is just a simple first overview, but let’s leave it at that for now. The list is by no means exhaustive, and each of the items above is probably a great opportunity for a series of follow-up articles. But rest assured - I’ll be happy to write them.

Read you again in a bit – and please get in touch or leave a comment below if you have any questions or remarks!