In recent years, many digital companies are trying to reduce the ecological impact of web hosting by applying a set of “green” solutions both on their website, their web hosting and their company.
So, what methods can you apply to remedy the ecological impact of your website today? First of all, let’s start by understanding what is at stake here.
Why have an Eco-Friendly Website in 2024?
In 2021, in just one year, the ecological impact of all websites was equivalent to that of all civil aircraft flights on earth.
Every time a person opens an Internet page in the world, a CO2 emission due to web hosting takes place and this is all the more significant when a page on a poorly optimized website is opened.
What is the Ecological Impact of Web Hosting?
Web hosting has a noticeable impact on the environment, since each action of Internet users on the web will require an electricity usage. So imagine for a moment how much electricity a web hosting server can consume.
In order to function optimally web hosting needs cold air, since these servers heat up significantly due to their operation at full power 24/7.
This cooling method helps avoid failures and preserves web hosting hardware, however it requires a lot of electrical energy. In fact, 40% of the electricity consumed by the web is used to cool web hosting servers.
If you want to choose environmentally friendly web hosting, we detail the ecological actions of several web hosting sites in this article.
Since it is web hosts who, today, can really have an effect on reducing electricity consumption around the world.
Eco Goals when Creating a Website?
The overall objective above all will be to reduce the ecological impact of your website.
Set of solutions exists such as reducing your electricity consumption generated by the power supply of your computer servers or your different means of browsing the Internet.
In addition, you can also optimize all of your media on your website, in order to minimize the resources necessary to display your web pages.
By reducing electrical consumption, we offset the carbon dioxide emissions and other greenhouse gas emissions, because they are used in generating electricity, which usually comes from burning coal.
Less energy usage, less carbon emissions, better air quality and more clean air for everybody.
Solutions to Reduce the Footprint of your Website
Choose Eco-Friendly Web Hosting
We will recommend several 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 allow you to 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 list a few of them:
- Powered by Renewable Energy: Their entire data center is powered by hydroelectricity.
- Energy-efficient SSD storage: Your data will be stored on solid-state drives, which use a fraction of the power needed for traditional hard drives in other web hosting.
- Ecological 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 their communication and billing by email.
PlanetHoster
Since 2009, PlanetHoster has sought to move towards futuristic, greener and more ecological web hosting. Here are some benefits of PlanetHoster’s Canadian infrastructure:
- Green energy: All energy comes 100% from hydroelectricity
- Ecological cooling system: The cooling system of their facilities is entirely powered naturally thanks to 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.
- Reduction of ecological footprint: PlanetHoster is committed to significantly reducing their paper consumption in their offices as well as lighting their offices using LEDs
Ex2
We recommend Ex2 which offers a type of “green web hosting”. It is therefore one of the hosts you can turn to 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 overconsumption: Ex2 is committed to not overconsumption with tailor-made plans to meet your needs.
- CO2 compensation: CO2 emissions fully compensated.
- Subsidy offer: subsidies are offered to employees for the purchase of an environmentally friendly means of travel.
Reduce Heavy Resources on your Website
Indeed, certain resources such as videos or high-quality images are significantly heavier than text content on a website.
By being larger, they therefore require more resources from the web hosting server in order to be displayed.
As you probably suspect, the heaviest resource is video, so avoid putting it in your content and instead choose to replace it with links on your website.
However, if a video is essential for you, we advise you not to put it in automatic playback on your website , rather prioritize triggering it by a user click 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 result in a reduction in electricity consumption at the web hosting level to display your page.
Even if this energy saving is minimal, you understand that if this consumption saving is realized as soon as a visitor opens a page of your website, it will then 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 a website is that during a user’s first visit to a website, certain loaded resources will be saved on the user’s browser.
So that these resources no longer have to be loaded by the servers during the next visits of the same users. This method will therefore save electricity resources for your web hosting.
All this can be configured on your website, this technique is very simple, you just need to add the following code to your “.htaccess” file:
## EXPIRE 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”
## EXPIRE CACHING ##
Otherwise if you have a WordPress site and want to activate caching there are different plugins for this like WpRocket for example.
Prioritize a Minimalist Design for your Website
The more elements there are to load on a website, the greater the energy consumption of web hosting, 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 demanding and requires many resources in order to display elements programmed with this language.
Limit Plugins on your Website
Certainly, WordPress plug-ins bring a lot of functionality to a website, however each plug-in requires more resources in order to be loaded in front of visitors or just to function.
Plug-ins will therefore reduce the loading time of your website pages since they add numerous elements (sometimes poorly optimized) to your source code and require numerous requests with your web hosting server.
So, we advise you to choose only the plugins that are essential for your website and remove those that do not provide real functionality.
There you are, you are now ready to reduce your ecological impact by reducing the electricity consumption of your website.
If you would like to reduce the electricity consumption of your website, do not hesitate to contact us for a free consultation and personalized support tailored to your needs and budget.
We are a web marketing agency specializing in website creation and optimization and we have been helping entrepreneurs and businesses for more than 10 years to succeed in their digital transformation.
