About 5.3 billion people use the internet every day. And though we tend to think of the internet as an immaterial luxury that floats around in the clouds (or “the cloud”), the internet is supported by a giant network of data servers that account for 1% of the global energy demand, which is more than the national energy consumption of many countries.
This energy comes from many places, and websites are one of them. There are about 200 million active websites around the world. And because the vast majority of data centers are still powered by fossil fuels, our time surfing the web can be summed up by a simple equation: data = electricity = CO2. “Every single thing we do online has small carbon footprint,” says Marketa Benisek, digital sustainability lead at the London-based digital sustainability consultancy Wholegrain Digital. “It’s small, but it adds up given how many internet users there are and how many things we do online.”
The good news is, websites can be made more sustainable by design. As part of their consultancy work, Wholegrain Digital built two demo websites titled Yuck and Yum (don’t bother searching for them, they don’t actually exist.) Both websites essentially looked the same, but with a few fixes, the team reduced the amount of annual CO2 emissions from 186kg for Yuck to only 1.4kg for Yum (based on 60,000 annual visitors.)
In the following guide, Benisek shares a wealth of best practices for building a greener website that is also pretty, fun, easier to navigate, and inclusive for people with disabilities or those with poor internet connection. We also delve into two case studies—a new website by the Norwegian architecture practice Snohetta, and the long-standing Low-tech magazine, which was founded in 2007 and has been running on a solar-powered server since 2018.
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