The direct impact of climate change on people’s everyday lives has driven up demand for sustainable products and services. According to PwC’s 2024 Voice of the Consumer Survey, 85% of consumers say they have first-hand experience of climate change disruption and are prioritising sustainable purchasing habits as a result. In this post, we examine how this consumer demand is pushing businesses to make their websites more sustainable and discuss how this can be achieved.
Contents
The benefits of a sustainable business website
The primary advantage of making a website greener is to lower its carbon footprint and limit climate change. A typical web page generates 0.5g of CO2 each time it is visited, with energy consumed through hosting, network transfer and powering/charging end-user devices. For websites with 20,000 monthly page views, this results in 120kg of CO2 a year. With around 200 million live websites around the world, some attracting billions of visitors a month, the need for businesses to reduce their site’s environmental impact is urgent.
Beyond environmental concerns, there are other benefits to making websites greener. By reducing a website’s energy consumption, businesses can lower their energy bills or by reducing their provider’s energy use, keeping hosting costs lower. Sustainability can also improve brand reputation, PwC’s survey noted that consumers were willing to pay 9.7% more for sustainability , meaning environmentally friendly businesses can charge a premium for their goods and services.
Considering cloud hosting? Read: How the Cloud Makes Your Company More Sustainable
Making your website greener
The principal way to make your website greener is by reducing its data size. This doesn’t necessarily mean reducing the number of pages but minimising the amount of data transmitted and stored. Smaller websites require less disk space and use fewer server resources, reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This can be achieved in a number of ways:
- Optimising code: By minimising scripts and compressing code you can reduce the file size and decrease the energy needed to transmit and process data.
- Optimising media files: By using smaller, image and video formats (e.g., WebP instead of JPEG) you can significantly reduce data transfer. Reducing dots per inch (DPI) for images has a similar effect.
- Streamlining plugins: For CMS platforms like WordPress, you can reduce data transfer by uninstalling any unnecessary plugins or using lightweight alternatives.
- Using efficient fonts: As larger font files and complex fonts (e.g. Serifs) consume more data and require additional processing, switching to simpler fonts can help.
- Implementing dark mode: As OLED screens use less energy to display dark pages than white ones, providing a dark mode option for your website can cut users’ energy consumption.
- Lazy loading: By loading images and videos only when the user scrolls down, you can reduce unnecessary data transfer.
- Split content: Rather than hosting everything on a single page, split content up across different topic-specific pages. This way, visitors only download the content they need.
The other advantage of these energy-saving techniques is that besides reducing carbon emissions, they also help speed up your website’s loading times, improving user experience and potentially boosting search engine rankings.
Find out the brand benefits of sustainability, read: Sustainability and CX – Online Success
Web hosting and sustainability
Another way to reduce your website’s carbon footprint is to choose a greener hosting solution. The hosting industry has made significant progress in its efforts to be more sustainable, with web hosts implementing various measures to limit their environmental impact. These include:
- Renewable energy: Many hosting providers are adopting green energy solutions like solar, wind or hydropower to run their data centres. At eukhost, for example, we are committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions through the use of renewable energy.
- Efficient hardware: Modern hardware, like SSDs and the newer NVMe SSDs, consume significantly less energy than older technologies. These improvements reduce the amount of energy data centres use and help minimise cooling requirements.
- Advanced cooling systems: With cooling accounting for 40% of data centre energy consumption, providers are adopting innovative cooling methods, such as liquid cooling, which are far more energy efficient than traditional HVAC systems. Some providers even recycle waste heat to generate additional power.
- AI-powered energy management: By using AI to monitor their energy consumption, data centres can optimise usage, for instance, they can put idle servers to sleep and adjust performance based on demand. This not only reduces emissions but also cuts data centre running costs.
By choosing a sustainability-driven provider, like eukhost, you can ensure your websites are hosted on the latest, energy-efficient infrastructure, reducing your carbon footprint and contributing to the fight against climate change.
For more, read: Going Green: Why Your Choice of Web Host Matters
Conclusion
With consumer demand for sustainability continuing to grow, greener businesses can benefit from the changes in customer behaviour. With regard to websites, owners can significantly mitigate their environmental impact by reducing website data size and choosing a sustainable web hosting provider. Together, these enable you to lower your carbon footprint, cut costs and enhance your brand’s reputation.
Looking for greener web hosting? At eukhost, we are committed to achieving net zero carbon emissions and doing so at pace. For more information, visit our Sustainable Hosting page.
