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The Impact of Online Traffic on Energy Consumption

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November 17, 2023 | Sanrio Valencia

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is essential to any digital marketing strategy that helps your website rank higher and attract more visitors. Websites aren't thought to consume a lot of electricity, but they do, and Internet systems are energy hogs when it comes to actual consumption. Each network consists of computers, forming a network of networks, and those computers consume energy in large quantities.

Many websites use SEO to increase traffic and convert customers, but it can also benefit the environment. Here are some tips for improving a website's energy efficiency, and you can visit Utility Bidder for more information on saving energy.

Does a Website’s Energy Consumption Matter?

Approximately ten percent of global electricity consumption is attributed to Internet use, which produces the same CO2 emissions as global air traffic. In terms of energy consumption, websites may not seem like the apparent culprits.

All websites you have visited are hosted on servers, often inside big data centres that must also run cooling systems that consume a lot of energy. End-user devices, transmission networks, and data centres consume a lot of electricity.

Website carbon emissions can be minimised by reducing the amount of electricity used to load, send, and view a web page and ensuring that the electricity is generated from clean, renewable sources. Sustainable web design, also known as green web design, is one way to lower a website's carbon footprint.

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Website Energy Efficiency: How Can It Be Improved?

The carbon footprint of our websites can be minimised in several ways. There is a possibility that some of these suggestions will have only a minimal impact. We will get closer to our net zero carbon emissions goal if we do little things and make minimal efforts.

Consider a Data-saving Website

The key to more sustainable web development comes down to three factors:

  • Streamline data consumption
  • An efficient page architecture
  • Use only media data that adds value

Data usage, energy consumption, and emissions can be significantly increased by including media, such as images, thumbnails, videos, design components, and advertising banners. Avoid overloading sites by using the right tools, compressing your photos, and choosing high-resolution video quality instead of the default. Additionally, it would help if you considered whether users benefit from your site's multimedia features.

Durability is another aspect of sustainability. With a modern design, a website ages more slowly and requires less effort to redesign and revise than one that follows fashion and design trends that fade quickly.

As a result, staffing and electricity costs are reduced, resulting in a more cost-effective relaunch process. It is a sensible step towards green web design to combine a minimalist aesthetic with a clear, functional structure.

Choose an Eco-friendly Hosting Service

Data centres and data transmission consume a lot of energy, and saving energy can be achieved by carefully choosing your web hosting.

Boost Page Speed

You should consider your site speed when creating a green website. A faster loading page uses less energy and emits less CO2. Additionally, a slow page speed indicates you are loading too many or heavy resources - this is a UX and carbon emissions issue that requires special attention.

Reducing the Size of Videos and Images

Most websites rely heavily on images to add weight to their pages. Data is transferred more quickly and efficiently when you use more images, and bigger image files use more energy. In reality, you don't need high-resolution images that take up several MBs, and sharp images are essential.

A slow-loading page is caused by heavy images, which is a terrible experience for web visitors, and SEO is also negatively affected by slow-loading pages. To reduce the weight of your images, export them in the correct size and format and compress them using a tool or plugin.

Selecting Fonts Carefully

Your website's performance can affect how you use fonts. Your carbon footprint and page speed can be negatively affected by messy fonts on your website. Optimising your fonts can be accomplished in the following ways:

  • Use fewer font families - Many websites load a lot of font families, but they only use one
  • Consider fewer font weights - do you need all the different variations of each font?
  • By using WOFF2 fonts, you can increase font compression by 24%.

Final Thoughts

Increasing traffic to a website is only one aspect of SEO; improving the user experience, being helpful, and reducing environmental impact are also important. Both users and the environment benefit from a technically lean and clean website.


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