How to Measure and Reduce your Website’s Digital Footprint

As a company on a mission to help organisations reduce their carbon footprint, the team at Compare Your Footprint was horrified to find out that our own website home page was rated 79% dirtier than other web pages. We ran our site through websitecarbon.com: 2.21g of CO2e every time a user visits our home page. With 49,529 home page views in 2022, that’s equivalent to 13,315 smartphones being charged annually.

Compare Your Footprint’s journey to a more sustainable website

1. Switch to a green server host

Look at Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) when reviewing green hosts. The lower the PUE, the better. We moved to a host with PUE of 1.12 compared to industry offerings of 1.2 or higher, accredited by The Green Web Foundation.

2. Sustainable web design

Use darker backgrounds (OLED screens use less energy), standard system fonts (avoid external font loading), compress images and use SVG where possible, and lazy-load videos so scripts only load on demand. After following these practices, our home page is now cleaner than 66% of web pages tested.

Three steps to reduce the carbon emissions of your website

1. Measure your carbon emissions using tools like websitecarbon.com. 2. Reduce data transfer: improve SEO so users find relevant pages faster, improve information architecture and UX, question every large image/video/font, perform content audits, compress images (WebP/AVIF), use server caching and CDNs, and reduce tracking scripts. 3. Switch to a green host powered by renewable energy — check The Green Web Foundation’s directory for certified providers.