From attachments to web design, how to reduce the environmental impact of websites
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According to estimates by the Global Carbon Project, if the web were a nation, it would be the third in terms of electricity consumption and the fourth in terms of pollution, after China, the USA and India. It is a count in which, to varying degrees, everyone participates: big tech, the large infrastructure of submarine cables and data centers essential for the contemporary economy, as well as small individual behaviours, which go from email management to smartphone browsing , tablet or pc.
The way a website is designed also determines its higher or lower energy consumption. According to estimates by the non-profit Green Software Foundation, web design could account for about 20-30% of a site’s total energy consumption and CO2 emissions. This is because it affects the size of data transfer which, in turn, affects the energy consumption of devices, network infrastructure, data centers.
The reduction of the environmental impact
Hand in hand with the increase in this awareness, businesses or business units focused on optimizing sites and reducing their environmental impact are emerging. The Valentino fashion house is one of the latest to have started a process, in collaboration with the Karma Metrix company, to measure the energy performance of its pages and websites and reduce their impact. And over one hundred companies have already trusted the start-up Code me Green.
Reply, the leading software and ICT company in Italy, present in 16 countries, has an internal team dedicated to the study of different green web design methodologies and their specific impact in terms of CO2 reduction, the result of collaboration with the start-up Daedalus.AI. The company’s chief technology officer, Filippo Rizzante, highlights the elements that make a site more impactful: the amount of data, mainly composed of content such as videos and high-resolution images (the larger the size of a site, the greater the energy consumed to transmit this data on the network and consequently C02 emissions); the amount of network requests, especially those made to load external resources, the efficiency of the code and that of the server. «By working on these factors, a website can significantly reduce its emissions. For example, image optimization alone can lead to a reduction in page size of up to 30-40%, which translates into a similar reduction in energy consumption and therefore in CO2 emissions», continues Rizzante.
“Streamlining” web design
«There are other tricks through which web designers can “streamline” websites further: for example, identifying and eliminating unused parts from the final version of a site using code analysis tools; reduce the size of individual files (a technique known as “minification”) by applying text compression algorithms to the code; not loading an image or video unless the user scrolls down to that section; limit the use of third-party scripts and ensure that those included are optimized for size; avoid excessive use of images, videos and complex animations such as the parallax scrolling, a web design technique that gives the impression that a foreground is moving in front of a background», explains Rizzante. “These techniques allow us not only to reduce its energy consumption, but also to offer users a smoother and faster experience.”
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