As the world goes green, have you thought about your site’s ecological footprint? Indeed, while its use seems benign, an Internet site consumes energy to function (hosting, calls, and execution of resources…), and this is to the detriment of the planet and sometimes of the user experience, we explain to you why.
HOW TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE ECOLOGICAL?
According to the site websitecarbon.com, a web page produces on average 1.76g of Co2 per view, which represents 211 Kg of Co2 per year for a site with 10,000 page views monthly.
This same site offers a tool for estimating a site’s carbon footprint, based among other things on:
data transferred over the network: this indicator is equivalent to the amount of data that is transferred when a page is loaded. This value is then weighted by the “cache” effect that visitors who have already visited the page may have.
energy used for web operation: datacenter, networks, and internet users’ devices (computer and telephones).
the traffic generated by the site: the more a site is visited, the more the number of requests sent increases, consuming energy.
HOW IS IT POSSIBLE TO MAKE YOUR WEBSITE ECOLOGICAL?
It is possible to act directly at the level of the hosting and the design of its site. It is then that we realize that web eco design and SEO ultimately have the same objectives: to save resources, to reduce the environmental impact but also to reduce loading times.
Location of the accommodation : part of the energy consumed comes from the transfer of data between the server and client devices (computer or mobile). This is why we recommend having a server close to the target market, since this distance also impacts loading times . For a site intended for several markets, we recommend the use of a CDN (Content Delivery Network), which will allow the data to be stored as close as possible to the Internet user.
Setting up a cache : the cache is used to store a constructed version of a page, thus avoiding the systematic reconstruction of the page on the server side, a source of energy expenditure.
Optimize images : according to httparchive.org, the weight of images in a web page represents a median of 969.7 KB on Desktop and 883.5KB on Mobile, or a little less than half the weight of a page. To limit resources you can then: compress your images, use different visuals depending on the device used by adapting the resolution, use lazyloading… The Search Foresight article on image optimization will allow you to dig a little deeper into the subject.
Limit the use of Javascript: Javascript files add to the weight of a page and their interpretations on the browser side require energy.
Choose your fonts : the fonts correspond to the fonts displayed on your site. To limit resources, you can use the available default fonts (Arial or Times New Roman, for example), which can be used without loading font files. If you want a custom font, then you can call only the variants you need (the Roboto font has for example more than 12 variants!)
Optimization work can also be carried out on the code of the pages, the css files, the videos,… or any other resources.
Beyond the optimizations carried out on a particular page, the exhaustiveness of the site can be analyzed in order to limit the generation of unnecessary pages, to eliminate the duplications of pages, …
Good natural referencing also saves energy; How? ‘Or’ What ? By making sure that the content offered to the Internet user corresponds to his request, thus avoiding relaunching his search and increasing the number of calls to the servers.
