Create an eco-friendly website: 6 tips for building low-consumption sites

It’s a growing trend, and one that will likely continue to gain importance in the coming years: businesses are increasingly turning their attention to ecology. How can they minimize their environmental impact? How can they take action for the climate? CSR principles are becoming more and more prevalent. Whether it’s a simple marketing argument or a genuine mission the company has set for itself, ecology is becoming a business concern.

While digitalization continues to accelerate, it also contributes more and more to pollution. Data centers, the rise of video, cloud computing… Many businesses are now wondering how to reduce the carbon footprint of their digital activities. One solution is to create eco-friendly websites. These sites aim to use the fewest resources possible by removing non-essential elements. Let’s explore why building an eco-friendly website is beneficial on multiple levels!

Why create an eco-friendly website?

There are several reasons to create an eco-friendly website. The first is to reduce the ecological impact of your business’s digital footprint. By minimizing the resources your site requires, you lower its electricity consumption. A small gain, perhaps, but multiplied by the number of users browsing your pages.

Another argument for building eco-friendly websites is a more business-oriented one. Fewer resources to load means a faster site. And faster sites tend to convert users better. Additionally, loading speed is one of the ranking factors Google considers. A faster site will therefore be more effective at turning visitors into customers and will naturally improve its visibility.

Beyond the ecological argument, there’s also a strong marketing case to consider if you want to create a more eco-friendly website.

Let’s take a concrete example: the homepage of Scroll.

Our talented developers worked to optimize our site’s pages as much as possible so they load as quickly as possible. The result: a better user experience, improved SEO, and fewer resources used to load them!

6 tips for creating an eco-friendly website

How can you create your own eco-friendly website? There’s no single answer, but rather a variety of tactics you can implement to reduce your ecological impact. Here are 6 tips to help you get started.

Choose a green web host

In the web hosting market, the most well-known names like OVH or O2Switch often come to mind. But there are lesser-known solutions with unique features. Among them, some hosts take a green approach and offer plans that limit your environmental impact.

Ikoula is a French provider that lets you host your site in data centers powered by renewable energy. Their servers are built using low-energy materials, and they’ve developed in-house innovative solutions to reduce CO2 emissions.

Infomaniak is a host that also uses green and hydropower energy. On top of that, the company invests in local ecological and social associations.

PlanetHoster powers its data centers 100% with hydropower and uses low-consumption servers. They also implement other initiatives, going beyond hosting, to have a positive impact on the environment.

Minimize heavy and unnecessary resources

Some resources are heavier to load than others. Images, for example, are heavier than plain text. Web applications can exchange numerous requests with servers to function.

However, video takes the crown as the heaviest common resource. If you want to reduce your page size, avoid embedding videos directly on your site: use links instead. If you still decide to keep videos on your site, ensure they don’t autoplay. Ask users to start them manually: this way, those who aren’t interested won’t load this extra resource.

Compress and use web-optimized formats

We still see this often, especially with images: webmasters don’t always use web-optimized formats. Whenever possible, use WebP or JPG formats, which maintain excellent image quality while reducing file size.

Free tools exist for this, such as PNGtoJPG. Also use image compressors to reduce their size.

By converting an image from PNG to JPG and applying compression, you can easily reduce its size by 90%! An easy, quick, and highly effective gain: your page load times will be significantly improved.

Use caching rules

On all websites, certain resources repeat across almost every page: CSS files, JavaScript, or even HTML snippets. Caching rules allow you to store these resources directly in the user’s browser. Each time the user needs to load them, they’ll be retrieved from their browser, avoiding numerous round trips to your server. The result: significant energy savings and reduced load times.

Choose a minimalist design

The more cluttered your website’s design, the more complex it is. And the more complex it is, the greater the number of requests needed to load it. Opting for a clean and simple design saves the energy required to load each of your pages. Favor HTML and CSS over JavaScript or other resource-intensive languages. Minimize your code size, carefully select the elements to display: the planet will thank you!

Note that this doesn’t mean stripping your site of all visual identity. Simply remove any superfluous elements. This is not only beneficial for the planet but also for your site’s interface, which often becomes more streamlined as a result. "Less is more".

Limit the number of plugins

This is a best practice found on many CMS platforms, but especially on WordPress. The latter allows you to customize your site with numerous plugins. Want to do something specific? There’s likely a plugin for it!

While this is one of its great advantages, it’s also one of its major drawbacks. Every time you install a new plugin, it leaves a footprint in your source code, slowing down your page load times by increasing the number of required requests.

Other CMS options exist, such as Webflow. Webflow is a no-code solution that relies on drag-and-drop: you add the elements you want directly to your page from the editor. With Webflow, you won’t need to install additional plugins—all features are already built into the core editor. A solution for developing websites more simply, while keeping the code minified!

Discover the ecological impact of your website

Want to measure the ecological impact of your website today? The site Websitecarbon lets you do it for free. Just enter your site’s URL to find out how much CO2 is produced every time a page loads.

Another very handy tool is Pagespeed Insights, by Google. While the tool focuses on performance rather than ecology directly, as we’ve seen, the two are closely linked! Enter your web page’s URL: you’ll get a score out of 100 indicating whether your page’s loading speed is good or not. Google will then provide a breakdown of all elements slowing it down: scripts, unused resources, redundant code… It’s up to you to streamline and keep only what’s essential!

Finally, a third, highly comprehensive tool: Ecometer. Ecometer will assess your page to tell you whether it’s eco-friendly or not. You’ll then receive a list of concrete actions to implement to improve your score and reduce your website’s environmental impact.

Scroll, the eco-friendly website creation agency

At Scroll, we’ve chosen to develop websites that are not only sleek and user-friendly but also eco-conscious using Webflow. We pay special attention to UX, development, and hosting to ensure sites are fast, practical, and kind to the planet. A win-win solution for everyone!

Want to create an eco-friendly website? Share your needs with us! A project manager will get back to you with tailored and relevant solutions.