6 tips to remedy the ecological impact of a website and web hosting in 2022

In recent years, many digital companies have been looking to reduce their ecological impact by applying a set of “green” solutions both on their website, their web hosting and within their company.

Following this new trend, many methods are applied to websites and web hosting. These methods have been invented in order to reduce the ecological impact of the Internet as much as possible.

So, what are the methods that you will be able to apply to remedy, today, the ecological impact of your website? But first of all, let's start by understanding the stakes of all this.

• Why is it important to have a green website in 2022?
• What is the ecological impact of your website or web hosting?
• What goals should you have today when creating a website?
• Here are the solutions to reduce the ecological footprint of your website or web hosting:
• Choose eco-friendly web hosting
• Reduce heavy resources on your website
• Compression of images in web format
• Enable caching on your website
• Prioritize a minimalist design for your website
• Limit plugins on your website

Why is it important to have a green website in 2022?

On March 21, 2022, the Internet had 1.93 billion websites , which is why it is essential today to know the latest methods in order to reduce your ecological footprint. 

In 2021, in just one year, the ecological impact of all websites was equivalent to that of all civil aircraft flights on earth. Each time someone consults an Internet page in the world, a CO2 emission due to web hosting takes place and this is all the more important when a page on a poorly optimized website is opened. 

What is the ecological impact of your website or web hosting?

First of all, web hosting has a colossal impact on the environment since each action of Internet users on the web will require an electricity resource from the hosts. So imagine for a moment how much electricity the servers of a web hosting can consume.

In addition, in order to operate perfectly to have the best possible response times for Internet users, web hosting needs cold air, since these servers heat up significantly due to their operation at full power 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. .

This method of cooling avoids failures and preserves the hardware of web hosting, however it requires a lot of electrical energy. Indeed, 40% of the electricity consumed by the web is used to cool the web hosting servers.

If you want to choose an eco-friendly web hosting, we have mentioned the ecological actions of several web hosting in detail in this article and we therefore advise you to choose one of them. Since it is the web hosting today which can really have an effect on reducing electricity consumption in the world.

What goals should you have today when creating a website?

To begin with, the overall objective will above all be to reduce the ecological impact of your website. For this, a set of solutions exist such as reducing your electricity consumption generated by the supply of your computer servers or your various means of browsing the Internet. 

In addition, you can also optimize all of your media present on your website, in order to minimize the resources necessary to display your web pages. 

Here are the solutions to reduce the ecological footprint of your website or web hosting: 

Choose eco-friendly web hosting

We will advise you of some hosts who are concerned about their environmental impact in Canada, the advantage here is that these web hosting will be close to you and therefore reduce the carbon footprint since you do not need to go through intermediaries.

Whc: 

Whc is a web hosting located in Canada, which offers hosting to more than 60,000 Canadian websites today. This host has many ecological advantages and we will name a few of them: 

• Powered by Renewable Energy : Their entire data center is powered by hydroelectricity.
• Power-efficient SSD storage : Your data will be stored on solid-state drives, which use a fraction of the power required for traditional hard drives in other web hosting.
• Environmentally friendly cooling : Most servers are cooled using an external air cooling system as well as water. 
• Paperless Communication : Whc is committed to saving trees by doing all of their communication and billing via email.

PlanetHoster 

Since 2009, PlanetHoster has been looking to turn to futuristic greener and more ecological web hosting. Here are some benefits of PlanetHoster's Canadian infrastructure: 

• Green energy : All energy comes from 100% hydroelectricity
• Green Cooling System : Their facility's cooling system is powered entirely naturally by Canada's climate.
• The life cycle of the servers : The life cycle of the servers of their web hosting is respected in order to be more ecological. 
• Ecological footprint reduction : PlanetHoster is committed to significantly reducing their paper consumption in their offices as well as lighting their offices with LEDs

Ex2: 

We recommend Ex2 which offers a type of “green web hosting”. It is therefore one of the hosts to whom you can turn to have a real impact at this level. Here are the different commitments made by Ex2 through its green web hosting:

• Zero carbon footprint : Ex2 is committed to completely eliminating its carbon footprint 
• No over-consumption : Ex2 is committed to decrease or altogether avoid overconsumption with tailor-made plans to meet your needs.
• CO2 offset: CO2 emissions fully offset.
• Subsidy offer : Subsidies are offered to employees for the purchase of an environmentally friendly means of transportation.

Reduce heavy resources on your website

Indeed, some resources such as high quality videos or images are significantly heavier than text content on a website. By being more imposing, they therefore require more resources from the server of a web hosting in order to be displayed.

As you can imagine, the heaviest resource is video, so avoid putting it in your content and choose instead to replace it with links on your website. However, if a video is essential for you, we advise you not to put it in an automatic playback on your website, rather prioritize the triggering by a user clicking on it in order to avoid loading resources that do not interest your visitor. 

Compression of images in web format

Many free and very easy to use tools are available on the internet to compress images or videos for your website in the right format. This will therefore lead to a drop in electricity consumption at the web hosting level to display your page.

Even if this energy gain is minimal, you understand that if this consumption gain is achieved each time a visitor opens a page on your website, then this will have a real impact. However, this is not the only advantage since thanks to this method you will also improve the user experience on your website with better fluidity. 

Enable caching on your website

The principle of caching of a website is that during the first visit of a user to a website, certain loaded resources will be saved on the user's browser. Hence, these resources would not have to be loaded by the servers during subsequent visits by the same users. This method will therefore save electrical resources at the level of your web hosting.

All this can be configured on your website, this manipulation is very simple, and you just need to add the following code in your “.htaccess” file: 

## EXPIRED CACHING ##

 ExpiresActive On

 ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"

 ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 1 year"

 ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"

 ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"

 ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"

 ExpiresByType application/pdf "access plus 1 month"

 ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access plus 1 month"

 ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"

 ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 year"

 ExpiresDefault "access plus 7 days"

 ## EXPIRED CACHING ##

Otherwise if you have a Wordpress site and want to activate caching there are different plugins for that like Wp rocket for example. 

To do this, do not hesitate to contact web service providers for the implementation of this technique so as not to make a mistake by deleting elements from your website. Oshara is a web agency that can support you in this process at a lower cost, if you are interested contact us . 

Prioritize a minimalist design for your website 

The more elements there are to load on a website, the higher the energy consumption of a web hosting will be, so prioritize a simple design with only the essential elements displayed on your website. Take advantage of it now since minimalism is very fashionable at the moment for a website.

We also advise you to mainly favor HTML and CSS rather than Javascript which is very greedy and requires many resources in order to display the elements programmed with this language.

Limit plugins on your website

It is clear that Wordpress plugins bring a lot of functionality to a website, however each plugin requires more resources in order to be loaded in the eyes of visitors or just to function. The plug-ins will therefore reduce the loading time of the pages of your website since they add many elements (sometimes poorly optimized) to your source code and require many requests with the server of your web hosting.

So we advise you to choose only the essential plug-ins for your website and remove those that do not provide real functionality. 

You are now ready to reduce your ecological impact by reducing the electricity consumption of your website. If you want to know more about the subject or want to reduce the electricity consumption of your website, do not hesitate to contact us for a free consultation and personalized support for your needs and your budget. 

We are a web marketing agency specializing in website creation and optimization and we have been helping entrepreneurs and companies for more than 10 years to succeed in their digital transformation.

While waiting for the next column, if you have any questions, call us. 

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