Becoming more environmentally friendly is essential for everyone these days. Doing our best to minimize our carbon footprint in various areas of our lives can vastly impact the world around us, but what about your website. Did you know your website might not be as environmentally friendly as you think? Even with top-rated web hosting and low-cost domain registration, you may not be doing enough to bring the carbon footprint of your website down, but there are ways to change that. Here are a few things you can do to reduce your website's carbon footprint.
Reduce Your Website's Energy Consumption
This may sound like a foreign concept to some, but do not simply go for the cheapest option when investing in affordable WordPress hosting. Load time of your website will have a significant impact on the energy used when customers visit it. It might be slightly more expensive for a plan that emphasizes faster load time, but it will pay off substantially with happy customers and a more environmentally friendly format. Besides investing in optimal shared WordPress hosting services, consider further optimizing your website.
Optimize Images – Image optimization is one of the best ways to help boost your website's load time. Reducing image size and optimizing images to load faster is free and can be done by reducing the size of PNGs and JPGs on the site. You can also opt for lazy loading images. These are images at the bottom of the page that will not be seen first. The thought process behind lazy loading images is that the customer will have to take in the top of the page information before going to the bottom, so those images can be optimized differently while still maintaining an environmentally friendly format.
Choose Your Hosting Company Wisely – Sustainability is everyone's priority, and there are plenty of environmentally conscious companies that work to reduce their carbon footprint and that of their clients. Easy WordPress hosting can be affordable and sustainable with the right hosting company supporting your website, so choose wisely.
Reduce JavaScript Used – JavaScript can be significantly beneficial to draw the eye of your visitors, but it eats up energy. JavaScript does not stop running once the page loads. It keeps going, so reducing the use of JavaScript on your site will help it become more environmentally conscious.
Inclusivity
We continually look for the latest and most fantastic devices to surf the internet and do our essential tasks. However, all of this technology comes at a price in our society. As more devices are made, more energy is used for their new materials. Still, the website owner can do a lot to help their customers have the best possible experience without excluding anyone.
When designing your site and choosing your WordPress hosting in the USA, work with the designer to ensure your site supports all past and present devices. Websites have a responsibility to be inclusive these days, and just because a device is a few years old should not affect its ability to access what the customer needs. The more device inclusive you can make your site, the less negative impact you will have on new phone consumption worldwide.
Keep Navigation Up to Date
Customers want to find your business, but when they have to go through various areas of the internet to find you, they will lose patience and use far more energy during their search. Look for ways to make your site easily findable online. Improve search accuracy by investing in website SEO and using high-quality links to your site.
Also, for your local SEO, keep your physical address up to date and information such as hours of operation updated often. According to their Google profile, there is nothing more frustrating and energy-consuming than thinking a store is open only to find our wasted time and money travelling to a closed establishment. Your customers, even those that are not solely environmentally conscious, will appreciate your efforts.
Making your website environmentally friendly and reducing your carbarn footprint is not tricky, but it is a crucial step every website owner should invest in. Like what we have listed above, simple steps will make their mark on your website and your overall reputation. Please make no mistake about it. More people than ever before are working to reduce their carbon footprint than ever before. They are taking measures individually but investing in companies that share their values. Ensure your site is part of the solution and not part of the problem by reducing its carbon footprint.
