All industries need to take action on Climate Change. That applies as much to the digital sector as it does to the building and travel sectors.
For that reason, I've worked hard to make this website as sustainable as possible.
The Website Carbon Calculator graded my efforts as:
A or 0.3g of CO2/view
(This test was run on the home page on 18th September 2024)
I'm proud of this, and also appreciate the picture is nuanced. It's possible to have a low-carbon website, whilst also working in an office powered by fossil fuels and flying every month on business trips.
How I did it
I chose to use a small number of images. I don't use images for decorative purposes, have no logo, and have few images in the website template.
I worked hard to compress the images that are used. Every image on the website is less than 50k in size, and most are less than 30k. This is achieved by using the WebP image format rather than PNG or JPEG, and by limiting image dimensions. I was surprised that WebP images were more efficient than PNG, given most of my images contain a small number of colours. But they were.
I picked a design that uses native fonts. That means when you visit the website, energy isn't expended downloading a new font in order to display the page. I'd prefer to use a stronger typeface, to be honest.
I selected a colour-scheme that uses a lot of black. If visitors are using a device with an OLED screen, that saves energy. For different screens this has no impact.
I chose a host that uses renewable energy for power. This is the biggest risk area - it's possible that the host, Google, aren't being honest about this.
Most of these principles were learned from Tom Greenwood's excellent book Sustainable Web Design.
Some caveats
This is a complex area to consider. When you visit a website energy is used by the server that hosts the website, by your device, and also by all the switches and devices data passes through along the way. I can choose a host that uses renewable energy, but I can't control the energy sources for the other parties involved.
As in other areas of sustainable living, one makes trade-offs. I'm a specialist in Google Analytics so I chose to install that on the website. That choice adds to the data expended when a page is viewed. It also adds to the energy Google uses to store that data on their servers. I made some sacrifices with regard to design to compensate for that.
The website is maintained using the Blogger CMS. I've read it would be more sustainable to use a static site generator. That's next on my list of low-carbon actions.