The majority of individuals consider digital activity as dematerialized and therefore neutral for the environment. However, each click on a website generates pollution with, for example, energy consumption. Fortunately, you can limit the environmental impact of your website by respecting web eco-design standards.
There are good practices to make your site eco-responsible and we tell you about them here.
Optimize the weight of images and other media
To make your website eco-responsible, you must first optimize its weight.
This includes reducing the weight of your visuals (images and videos). Images make up 90% of the web . But you can reduce their weight (not to mention size) by 80% by using the right image compression tools . In addition to reducing the carbon impact of your site, this will improve your natural referencing.
In addition, we must not lose sight of the fact that websites are currently all responsive and displayed mainly on mobile, the gain in terms of loading time is all the more important. The slimming cure of your media is therefore imperative.
Optimize your website code
In addition to visuals, you should minimize and clean up your website’s source code.
Keep code simple and remove all unnecessary HTML and CSS. If you use a SEO content services management system (CMS) like WordPress or PrestaShop, you can use very effective plugins (extensions) like WP ROCKET to make your job easier. Each character of the code represents 1 byte. You can also enable Gzip compression to further reduce the size of your pages.
Also, remember to determine the must-have features so that you only use the really necessary plugins . This will help limit the number of requests on your site and therefore reduce its digital pollution. In addition, your site will be light, fast and pleasant for search engines.
Even if the compression tools are effective, clean code and optimized CSS files from the creation of your website are essential.
Choose an eco-responsible web host
Making your site eco-responsible is good and choosing a host that uses renewable energy is better!
👉 A green host stores the data of the websites it hosts on its own datacenters.
These hosts promote lofty environmental standards and corporate social responsibility (CSR) policies. They use optimized hardware and some use natural outside air to cool the data rooms. Still others choose to plant trees to offset their CO 2 emissions .
Opt for a minimalist design to have an eco-responsible site
Do a purge to remove everything superfluous, be it media, text content, features or even colors. Keep only the minimum necessary.
Your sidebar is useless for your users? Delete it! This will improve the loading speed of your pages and help make your website eco-responsible. Better: your natural referencing will be delighted.
Make your site ergonomic
An eco-designed site is also a responsive, intuitive and ergonomic site .
A poorly thought-out tree structure increases the number of clicks users need to find the information they are looking for. This unnecessarily increases the website’s carbon footprint. So take the time to simplify the tree structure of your site and implement the responsive design.
This is how you will make your site eco-responsible and offer a good user experience to your visitors.
Reduce queries
Each query launched consumes energy and generates digital pollution.
Do you really need jQuery? Are all those installed web fonts useful? What about embedded videos and image carousels? Be aware that an embedded YouTube video increases the data transfer by 1MB.
Sometimes we overestimate our needs when it is possible to achieve the same or even more with fewer resources. You may only need an image and not a carousel. You may also be able to stick with just pure JavaScript and even only display the link of your YouTube videos.
Use a caching system to facilitate loading
When a user visits your site for the first time, their browser downloads all the files needed to display the page.
You can ask the browser to “cache” all these files. Thus, all the files that have not changed will be reused each time you visit this same page. This will result in reduced data transfer and power consumption.
💡 This eco-responsible approach will also increase the loading speed of your pages .
Use lazy load
Lazy Loading or lazy loading consists of loading images and other media only when necessary.
Other than the top of page elements, everything else loads as the user scrolls down . No media loads unnecessarily, reducing your site’s power consumption.
Opt for an eco-responsible design
A simple and clean design will make your pages easier to load and reduce its impact on the environment.
If you are using a heavy theme, it should be changed to a lighter theme . The ideal is to use a clear design with as much white space as possible. The simpler, the better!
