Find out why your website should also be 'green' and how to improve it with sustainable web design.
"If the Internet were a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter in the world"
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has estimated that information and communication technologies (ICT), including the Internet, are responsible for around 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a figure that could increase to 3.5% by 2025.
The green ethic is now an ingrained concept among design and non-design brands that take the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development seriously. An appointment that no one wants to miss. This is why private individuals and companies are moving very quickly towards choosing eco-sustainable actions, also in terms of digital communication.
Thus, sustainable web design, an approach that prioritises the health of our planet by focusing on reducing carbon emissions and the energy waste generated by accessing online services, is gaining ground.
In the Sustainable Web Manifesto, a declaration of intent to create a sustainable Internet, there are six key adjectives to consider when creating green web design products and services: clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative and resilient.
How do you develop a green site in practice?
Let's start with our method.
Choosing a smart working process and collaborative design becomes as crucial as the end result given by the development. With our method, the development process is overall more adaptive and more efficient in terms of costs and resources.
Here are some 'rules of conduct' for developing a green website:
1. Sustainable hosting: Choose web hosting that uses renewable energy as its power source. This way the website will be supported by an infrastructure that uses clean energy sources, helping to reduce the environmental impact of hosting. Our partner Seeweb is SO14001 certified and a Gold Partner of The Green Web Foundation, an international organisation working to raise awareness in the IT world for a total transition to the use of renewable energy so that website owners can reduce their carbon footprint and help preserve the environment.
2. Optimizing images and videos: Images and videos can be heavy and require a significant amount of server resources and thus increase energy consumption to be displayed. It is important to optimise images and videos to reduce their size and improve website performance.
3. Use of clean and compact code: The website code should be written in a clean and compact manner, with the aim of reducing the amount of energy required to load the website.
4. Use of clean technologies: Using clean development technologies, such as CSS and HTML, reduces the amount of energy required to load the website. In addition, the use of image and code compression tools can help reduce the size of the website and thus the loading time.
5. Responsiveness: a responsive website, which adapts to different screen sizes, allows visitors to access the website from any device without having to download unnecessary images or data, thus reducing energy consumption.
Can a green website also be BOLD?
Absolutely yes! Our attitude goes green, indeed multicoloured... see for yourself our award-winning project www.we-flow.it.
we-flow.it is design, engineering, marketing and data science. A consulting firm that supports corporate management in the generation of value.
A web project that involved the entire team, allowing us to delve into technologies and techniques to create a sustainable project with only 0.16g of CO2/visualisation (polluting less than 85% of websites) while achieving a user experience with a unique value, colourful look&feel that has allowed us to receive international awards such as FWAOFTHEDAY AND CSSDAOFTHEDAY.
Have we intrigued you? Check out our web experience service!