How to have a sustainable website, according to us

We are human; our entire existence has an environmental impact. Yet certain things have more than others, like the technologies we can no longer do without. What do we do, go back to the dark ages of the Middle Ages? That’s not the case. But we can still adjust our aim. We can, for example, try to make conscious choices, even when it comes to digital. Because, it’s true: everything digital is immaterial, but it still leaves a (carbon) footprint. If the web were a nation, it would be the fourth country in the world for electricity consumption. Every click, every 4K kitten video, every line of code forgotten in a corner of the server consumes resources; it hurts the planet. So why not build an ecological web? A digital and green world, to use an English term that is so popular. Well, we at No Digital Brain always try to do that. And we do it through precise – ethical – choices, which we will also talk about in this article. But here the focus is different. Because here we are talking about sustainable websites, which do leave a footprint, albeit reduced to a minimum. We are therefore talking about best practices, principles and standards that you should take into consideration if you are thinking of making (or remaking) your website. Read a bit of what we have prepared for you.

Environmental sustainability also involves the web

When we talk about ecology, we immediately think of water bottles, electric cars and canvas bags. All nice, and all very useful too. But is it enough? We fear not. Consider that every time a user lands on your site, a colossal infrastructure is activated. The user’s device sends a request that travels through miles of underwater and terrestrial cables to reach a data center (which are, in case you didn’t know, like ‘warehouses’ full of servers turned on 24/7). Once it gets there, the information comes back, ‘weighing’ on the network based on how much data it has to carry. The heavier the site, the more energy is needed to move it. Every byte has an energy cost. These are things that people generally don’t think about, unless they are ‘in the loop’ – in the industry, in short. And in fact, we think about it. It is clear then that environmental sustainability is not just for activists with canvas bags. It also involves the web. Your site, to be precise.

What a sustainable website must have

So: what to do? where to start? In truth, it’s simpler than you think. Just make some precise choices – in infrastructure, design, code – that can make a difference. Let’s look at them together.

First, a green web hosting…

The starting point is choosing where to host your site. And no, not all hosting is the same – not just in terms of performance or price, but also in terms of environmental impact. A green hosting (in short: an ecological hosting) is a provider that powers its data centers with renewable energy, or that offsets its emissions by purchasing green energy certificates – the so-called Guarantees of Origin (GO). In practice, even if the data center physically consumes electricity, that electricity corresponds to energy produced from clean sources: solar, wind, hydroelectric. How do you know if your hosting is really green? The Green Web Foundation provides a free search engine: enter your site’s URL and find out immediately if it is hosted on sustainable infrastructure. If the result is negative, you could contact the provider and verify that sustainable practices have been adopted, even if they do not appear from the automatic check you just did. If you discover that this is the case, it might be time to change providers.

…then a sustainable web design!

Aesthetics come at a cost. And it’s not just economic, unfortunately; it’s also energetic. A site visually rich in elaborate animations, autoplay videos, custom fonts loaded from external servers and unoptimized images is a site that weighs – and that weighs down the network with every visit. Usually this is discussed in terms of web performance, of slow loading that penalizes the site. However, the environmental issue cannot be overlooked. Does this mean you have to give up aesthetics? That you necessarily have to settle for a boring site? Absolutely not. When we talk about sustainable web design we are referring to a series of technical choices that do not affect aesthetics but serve – rather – to reduce (literally) the weight of the elements. Images will then be compressed. Modern formats, such as WebP, weigh less than classic JPGs and PNGs and offer the same visual rendering. Videos will no longer all be in autoplay. Fonts loaded on external servers will be avoided. In short: it’s about making conscious choices. For maximum performance with minimum impact.

And also clean code and minimal content

The issue obviously also touches on code and content. Regarding code – let’s be clear – we are entering more technical territory, but it’s worth dwelling on this too, even if you are not a developer. The code that makes a site work can be written well or written poorly. Bloated code (that is: full of useless functions, plugins installed and forgotten, scripts that load even when they are not needed) is an end in itself. And it consumes a lot of energy that could instead be saved. How? For example with fewer plugins, optimized code, images that load only when the user is about to see them (thanks to lazy loading). In short, with small precautions that, when added up, make a concrete difference. And then there is the content. It is a widespread belief that publishing a lot is always better. But it’s not like that! Because publishing a lot leads to duplicate pages, obsolete articles never removed, infinite archives of forgotten posts occupy space on servers. A periodic cleaning of content then becomes an act of digital sustainability in all respects – as well as common sense.

Have you measured your site’s environmental impact?

So far you have read the theory. But how does all this translate into concrete numbers? There is a tool called Website Carbon Calculator that does exactly this. Just enter your site’s URL and in a few seconds you get an estimate of the CO₂ emissions generated by every single visit. The result might surprise you, for better or for worse. Look at the result for No Digital Brain below: Our site is more sustainable than 68% of the web average. And we are still doing a lot, in terms of code ‘cleaning’ and other news that will be online soon. Keep in mind that an average site produces about 0.5 grams of CO₂ per visit. It seems like very little, but multiply it by a few thousand visits per month and the number starts to have a different flavor. The most virtuous sites manage to drop below 0.1 grams; the heaviest ones can exceed a gram. Measuring is the first step. Without data, you work on feeling – and feelings, in this field, tend to reassure us more than they should.

The ethical choice of No Digital Brain

For No Digital Brain, ecology is a cornerstone. So the things you’ve read so far are NOT just advice; we actually do these things. The sites we create are hosted exclusively on sustainable servers – that is, powered by renewable energy, certified through Guarantees of Origin and the ISO 14001 standard. Our providers (Ergonet and Seeweb) guarantee us that every kilowatt-hour consumed corresponds to one produced from clean sources. You can check it yourself on the Green Web Foundation: you can find them there, with the green badge. The first choice, then, is hosting. The second, more symbolic, is however equally important to us. For every new site we create, or every time support is activated on an existing one, we plant a real tree with Treedom. Every tree is photographed, geolocated and has its own online page. The client becomes its guardian and can follow its story over time. Now, if you’ve made it this far, you probably care about the issue. Do you want a site that weighs less on the planet? Let’s talk about it.