What is Sustainable Web Design?
Curious about green software development? While many people think all software is “green” simply because it lives in the cloud, this isn’t the case. Sustainable web design refers to practices that promote internet sites with minimal environmental impacts. This type of web design is a priority for proactive individuals who recognize how their online presence affects the physical world. Learn more about how prioritizing sustainability can impact your website design.
Isn’t Going Paperless Enough?
Before we get into the real nuts and bolts of going green with your website, it’s important to underscore how critical sustainability is for the internet. People may think that going paperless is the best way to go green, but cloud operations still have an environmental impact. Mainly, the concern is how internet sites lead to energy consumption and carbon emissions.
Keeping a website online requires physical servers and telecom towers. Those physical aspects of software development come with their own carbon footprint. Then, there’s the further impact of usage on top of that physical equipment. All the hours of coding, maintenance, updates, and more stack up.
Electricity use is a huge factor here, both for software creation and for the hardware required to create and keep the information online. For data to be transmitted and stored, physical hardware has to have the capacity to collect and manage that information, which requires water to cool the system. Essentially, using the internet has a significant environmental impact. That’s where sustainable web design comes in.
Why Sustainable Web Design Matters for the Internet: By the Numbers
Let’s look at the numbers for why sustainability matters for the internet. First of all, energy consumption will likely triple in the next five years. That stunning expectancy demonstrates how important it is to think green for our online presence now—before it gets too late. Not only are more users coming to the internet, but current and future users will require more data than in the past.
As more and more of our activities are performed online, it’s projected that internet-connected devices will produce 3.5% of global emissions within 10 years and 14% by 2040. That dramatic increase is a warning that failure to implement sustainable web design could result in disastrous effects on the environment. The internet's carbon footprint is already larger than that of some countries and is expected to rise exponentially. The numbers repeatedly demonstrate how green software development is more than just a buzzword or nice idea: this is a critical aspect of being responsible at keeping the world in good shape.
The Principles of Sustainable Web Design
Just like applying sustainable practices to other aspects of our lives, there is a variety of ways to go about this process. However, in general, there are some core principles when it comes to sustainable web design. The Sustainable Web Manifesto defines the guiding principles of this type of web design as clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient. That means, broadly, that digital information is accessible, user-controlled, truthful, enduring, and renewably sourced.
Websites that are sustainable, of course, exist on a spectrum. You can have a website that improves in sustainability while still being less “green” than a competitor, for example. We may never reach perfect sustainability, but we can (and should) do better to prioritize green software development. Here are some tips on what to address in your quest for sustainability.
Promote Transparency and Intuition in Website Navigation
One great way to go green with your website is to improve how users can search and navigate through it. Your site will use less energy when fewer server requests are made, but you don’t have to reduce your website traffic in order to reduce your environmental impact. You can get fewer server requests with the same or more visitors to your site when you make your website easier to navigate.
Promote transparency with the search features on your website with obvious labels for all menus and their categories. Include a proactive search function that’s easy to find. Intentionally focusing on making website navigation an intuitive process for your visitors will not only significantly improve the consumer experience but also be a core component of your successful sustainable web design.
Only Collect the Data You Need
We live in a world saturated with data. Your website is full of it. But you don’t need to store unnecessary data, especially not about your users. Of course, the right user information can be invaluable when it comes to marketing, retaining clients, and more. But you don’t want to overstep your boundaries, or waste energy, by extraneously tracking user behavior. Protecting the privacy of your users is a delicate balance, but really considering what data you actually need, and not taking the rest, will help you go green and stay ethical.
Look at Your Server
Depending on the nature of your website, you may have a large server hosting your data or you might have a smaller-scale solution. Either way, an important part of green software development is looking at your server. Getting a sustainable webhost can make a big difference in the carbon footprint and energy emissions that come from your website, both directly and indirectly. Verifying energy sourcing can be complicated, but servers or hosts that have verified commitments to the environments will be clearly labeled as such.
Don’t assume that only small, sideline companies can be green. Google has committed to be sourced by 100% renewable energy, and they remain the world’s largest corporate buyer of renewable power. You can use ClickClean to determine what sources or apps use renewable energy, and apply those aspects to your website accordingly. You don’t have to be 100% renewable to make a difference either. Even 5% more green operations could compound over time to help the planet.
Maximizing Performance Efficiency
Sustainability isn’t a one-time venture, but a lifelong process. With any good web design, you have to continually monitor the various aspects of the site. Maximizing performance efficiency will let you create a website that is more eco-friendly. For example, you can enable browser caching, embed videos rather than natively hosting, and reduce automatic redirects. A step further into the code, you can even minify, or remove unnecessary characters to reduce file size. Maximizing the efficiency of your website’s performance is a unique and difficult process, but it will help with sustainable web design.
For a priority on sustainability for your website, address in your regular diagnostics what is really necessary for you to have running. Keep the essentials active and disable the rest. Let’s say you’re running a promotion for a holiday special and you have a plugin to automatically apply the discount codes for the event. That’s great—but when the event ends, and you’re not using the plugin, all it’s doing is taking up space, creating unnecessary environmental impact. Your website will be faster, smoother, and greener once disabling unused plugins.
Removing extraneous plugins may feel burdensome, but this can add up quickly. So when you run regular diagnostics to only keep active the website aspects you really need, you’re helping your customers have a better experience while making your website more sustainable at the same time. That’s a win-win.
Sustainability with Us
Now you know what sustainable web design is, but it still may sound overwhelming. The good news is that sustainability is best accomplished through steps in a continual process rather than with sweeping gestures (although sometimes you do need to make big changes, too). Even more importantly, you don’t have to go about your green software development alone.
Let us work with you to center your software in an environmentally healthy perspective, letting sustainability lead you to a higher standard for efficiency that’s better for your site, your customers, and the planet. Soluntech provides fast, quality results on custom software development with pricing that is both competitive and transparent. Plus, we offer a free pre-consultation and quote. If you’re ready to up your green software development game, come to us for a customized sustainable web design plan.