Do you know that websites have carbon footprints as well? Its carbon impact is primarily caused by electricity use.
You must decrease websites’ energy consumption and environmental impact by developing more energy-efficient sites for a greener planet.
In this post, we’ll walk you through ways to minimize wasted energy and ensure that the products you’re using are as energy-efficient as possible.
Everything we’ve listed in this post will help make your site more energy-efficient, enhancing performance and user experience.
1. Optimize images to reduce the file size
While high-resolution images might look great on your site, do you know that they can also be one of the most significant contributors to a slow loading time and more energy consumption?
At Sytian Productions, (website developer philippines,) we tell clients that one of the simplest ways to lighten the load is to reduce images. Make sure that you’re fussy about the images that you’re using. Do they have a specific purpose, or are they there for aesthetic purposes? Make sure that you’re only using the ones that you need.
Make sure to decrease the image resolution while keeping the image quality intact. You can also use tools like TinyPNG before uploading them on your site.
2. Be strategic in using videos
Videos, same as images, can affect the performance and efficiency of your website. Since using videos has been effective over the last couple of years, it’s also effective when engaging and capturing your audience’s attention.
It would be best to do several things to decrease its negative impact. One of the best ways is to limit using videos unless necessary. Then, you can directly embed them on your site but don’t set them into autoplay.
2. Improve site navigation
A site with unclear navigation only confuses, if not annoys, users. But that isn’t the only downside of it. It also increases people’s time to click around your site and find the information they need.
So, take your time to think about your audience’s personas and needs. Also, make sure that you set up a clear and solid site structure.
3. Optimize user experience (UX)
One of the main elements of a great user experience is decreasing friction in user journeys. Ideally, you want users to look for the things they want, do the actions they need, and make it as streamlined as possible.
A great user experience makes the user experience easy and enjoyable for everyone. It decreases the amount of energy that’s often wasted when navigating from one page to another. That way, you won’t confuse people trying to decipher what action they need to take next.
3. Practice sustainable web development
A well-written code is more efficient. Coding your site minus the bloated plugins and libraries have more functionalities needed, decreasing the energy consumed by your website.
Code compression allows you to convert the code written and read it as humans into a production-ready version that is optimized for machines.
4. Choose fonts carefully
In the same way, using creative fonts make your site more appealing. But the drawback to this is the extra file weight. The standard weight of a single font file can ho as much as 250 kb. There’s an additional 250 kb added if you want to make it bolder.
File optimization can also decrease the file size by up to 97%, even for custom fonts.
Here are some of the ways you can reduce a custom web font’s impact:
- Choose system fonts whenever possible. While you might feel that Times New Roman or Arial are less attractive, these are already installed on the user’s device. Therefore, there’s no need to download any font files.
- Limit font variations. Reduce the number of typefaces and the various weights that these typefaces have.
- Pick a contemporary web font file formal that has effective compression methods. The fonts should only include characters needed for the webpage.
5. Use accelerated mobile pages (AMP)
Accelerated mobile pages are specifically tailored to make your content load faster on mobile devices. It strips any unnecessary code and file weight, which will deliver a minimalist version of the original web page.
While, in theory, technologies like AMP don’t make your site efficient, they can be a handy tool to deliver a more lightweight and energy-efficient site to mobile users.
You should also note that Google prioritizes AMP content on mobile search results. Therefore, it enhances the visibility of your content. The downside here is that your content might be delivered on a Google domain. Similarly, some things could be stripped out that you consider essential. It’s a powerful tool. Therefore, you should be using it wisely.
6. Use server caching
Caching technologies will create static versions of every page so that server overhead can be significantly decreased for most visitors.
This, in turn, decreases server energy consumption and can make a significant difference to page loading times.
7. Choose a great host
Finally, make sure that you look for a host which combines excellent customer support, solid performance, and uses renewable energy. Most hosting companies don’t usually run their data centers. Meaning they have little control over how those servers are run.
But one of the things that you need to look for is to pick a hosting provider partnered with Google Cloud Platform. Google will match the energy consumed with renewable energy. They’re also dedicated to carbon neutrality. It allows you to develop a green and sustainable website.
Over to You
So, there you have it. To create a sustainable, energy-efficient site, make sure that you follow these best practices. By implementing these small, yet significant changes in your site, you can do your part in making your site eco-friendlier. In the same way, these changes also significantly enhance user experience and your site’s SEO, making it a win-win.
Not only are you optimizing your site for a better user experience, but you’re also helping our planet by saving on energy consumption.
