Editorial
The Gist
- Eco-strategy. Sustainable website design is key to lowering a brand's digital carbon footprint.
- McKinsey insights. Sustainable web design can balance environmental concerns and user engagement.
- Digital balance. Focusing on reducing your digital footprint can have economic and ecological benefits.
According to a report from McKinsey & Co., enterprise technology emits about 350 to 400 megatons of carbon dioxide emissions each year, representing about 1% of total global greenhouse gas emissions. Within that statistic, the retail industry alone represents around 15 to 20 megatons of CO2.
Let’s take a look at sustainable website design.
Brands largely recognize that they are responsible for a sizable digital footprint, and many are taking steps to reduce it. A separate McKinsey & Co. report found that more than 65 global retailers have set science-based goals to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, up from just a handful back in 2016.
One of the priority targets for efficiency improvements is sustainable website design for corporate sites. According to Wholegrain Digital, which runs Website Carbon Calculator, the average web page produces 1.76 grams CO2 per page view. For a website with 100,000 monthly page views, that’s already more than 2,000 kgs of CO2 per year. SEMRush data shows Walmart gets more than 350 million views. The impact can be huge.
What can brands do, though? Business success requires getting more traffic, not less.
It comes down to maximizing efficiency.
Related Article: Designing Sustainable Websites
Sustainable Website Design: Identify Your Website’s Digital Footprint
First, let’s acknowledge that a website’s carbon footprint is another way of expressing how much bandwidth it consumes. Once we consider how many data-rich images, videos and immersive experiences are needed to power a modern digital experience — combined with how many visitors medium and large businesses attract to their sites — it’s easy to see how quickly bandwidth consumption, and, by association, emissions, can add up.
Before venturing forward on a change campaign, establish a benchmark of where things stand today. Sources such as the Website Carbon Calculator and Image Carbon, which specifically calculates carbon emitted from images, are both wonderful places to start for establishing a sustainable website design.
Related Article: 4 Ways Sustainability Affects the Customer Experience
Reduce Emissions While Delivering a Great Experience
The good news is that marketers should continue to think big when it comes to engaging with consumers online, including continuing to produce data-rich immersive experiences. All it takes is a way to limit the bandwidth that each asset consumes.
Let’s take a look at three of the most impactful.
- Control the cache. A cache is a temporary storage area that mimics a website or a mobile app’s content. The content is hidden and stored away but immediately loads when a user returns. A cache efficiently reduces overall bandwidth because it does not require a request to be sent to a backend server for every visit. And, if a brand uses a content delivery network (CDN), which is a system of distributed servers across many data centers, the cache can reduce the load even more. Even better, a multi-CDN approach can pick the most efficient delivery for every customer’s unique viewing context.
- Leverage lazy loading. The term lazy loading refers to when a site will only load large-file images or videos when it needs to. For example, if there is a high-data video at the bottom of a page, the video only loads when the user scrolls to watch it. Lazy loading requires less data to be transferred up front and consumes less energy without negatively impacting the user experience.
- Increase automation. Perhaps the greatest way to reduce a digital footprint is by incorporating automation tools programmed for optimal content delivery. These tools run at all times, automatically deploying the most efficient asset possible while ensuring video and image quality remains picture-perfect to the viewer. These automations intelligently select the file type and visual quality to keep sites running fast, with minimal bandwidth consumption, without sacrificing impact.
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Online Content Can Be Engaging and Sustainable
Brands no longer need to accept tradeoffs between quality digital experiences, profitability and sustainable website design. They can (and should!) still invest in high-fidelity images and videos and immersive experiences that customers love to engage with. But by focusing on sustainability as a guiding principle, they can also improve page speeds and the user experience while keeping CO2 emissions to a minimum.
It’s win-win-win. Who doesn’t love that?
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