Top Tips

  1. đź’ˇ Use green energy. This one is pretty simple, switch to hosting your website on a server that uses green energy. Examples include: GreenGeeks, Ipage and A2 Hosting among others.
  2. 🎨 Chose colours wisely. Contrasting colours on a web page prevents users from turning up their brightness and wasting their battery use. Interestingly, darker websites use less energy than brighter ones, a challenge for a company like Zevero who focus on bright colours and earthy tones to create a positive outlook on carbon emissions. You can use websites like colourable to check the contrast on your website and find ways to improve this.
  3. 🖼️ Pictures make perfect. Images take a fair amount of energy to load, but there are a few tips to minimise their impact on your website. One, use SVGs over PNGs or JPEGs. SVGs are coded, have smaller file sizes and are more responsive while saving energy. Two, compress your images with websites like Compressor.io. Keep the same quality images while having lower emissions, a win-win.
  4. 🔤 Your font choice matters. Try to keep to one font and avoid using multiple weights and sizes wherever you can. Using Google fonts that everyone will have on their computer helps keep your website size down as well.
  5. 📺 Videos. If you need to use videos on your website, make sure they don’t autoplay and instead need to be clicked. This means they are only buffered when they need to be. GIFS are also a great tool as they’re smaller than videos while still being an effective tool to communicate your product. Top tip - if you use GIFs, make sure you have them running constantly, not just when a user interacts. It may seem counterproductive - but the more complex your site, the more energy is used.

Test it yourself:

  1. Use a Website Carbon test to estimate your webpage carbon footprint. This can be helpful to see how your website’s impact on your carbon footprint compares at the beginning and the end of your process.
  2. Check the size of your website and find ways to minimise its impact. Thanks-in-Advance are a good example of a company who have created a site using some of these aforementioned tips - it amounts only to around 37 KB!

Useful Websites

Image Compression Site

Website Size Checker

**How web content can affect power usage**

Website Carbon Checker

**Thanks-in-advance**

Thanks in Advance Excel Spreadsheet

Track the carbon footprint of a tweet