How To Make An Environment Friendly Website?

I hope that you already have at least some indicators that allow you to evaluate the ecological footprint that your website leaves on the planet.

Today we are still talking about the environment and websites, performance, and some technical solutions that allow you to create or make your website an environment-friendly website.

What Is The Problem?

The problem is that the network, due to its nature in 2020, in addition to being obese, is negative for the environment, as we have already commented on different occasions. The network is growing exponentially and on a scale probably inconceivable for the planet.

Change is always a possibility, some would say, but right now we consume more than five years ago and we spend more energy. In addition, we use digital means for this, and due to personal whims and sectoral interests we continue to bet on digital technologies that have not been very useful to date and that consume a lot.

Lime Is One Of The Solutions?

In the midst of all this, as a programmer or developer, how could you reduce existing damage, how could you develop or make your website or web application not so bad for the environment? You can do it having, among other things, the ones I tell you below.

Is Dark Mode Positive?

The next time your client or users ask for dark mode for your application, think about the following: black does not mean that the screen is off and you are using less energy.

It turns out that LED screens can do this effect, which we like so much – at least I do – but these screens still use light to show black, right?

Also, most dark mode themes are not pure black. These are combinations of darker grays that reduce eye strain.

Therefore, as a designer and/or developer, I think you have a responsibility to alleviate the problem from your initial context before it reaches the end-user. You will be developing a better, faster, more reliable, more robust website with a great digital experience for your end-user!

What Else Can I Do To Help The Environment?

Having to decide whether or not to use dark mode is just a modern part of the problem. You can also take into account the following actions:

Audit The Carbon Footprint Of Your Website

In the article in which we reflected on whether this, the current one, is the WWW we want, we referred to a website that allows you to estimate the carbon footprint of your website. Use this website to understand if you are doing it right. 🙂

Take Care Of The Servers And Work With Them

Modern servers are very well optimized and designed to deliver markup to your users’ devices. This means that they will know – or should know – to process your business logic and display the results to users.

Your server providers want to give you an efficient service – with energy savings -, so you must take care of them and work with them, or let them work for you.

You should also spend time on solutions that prevent your user’s device from doing the work. Surely there is some way for the server to do the job.

One way to know and ensure it is by doing tests and user tests to optimize, program what is necessary, and discard what does not make sense. The universal 80/20 design principle or the MVP can help you in this process, and remember that the less processing, the less environmental impact.

Use Real Static Websites Whenever Possible

Why choose a static website and not a CMS? Read Sergio’s article and then continue reading this one.

The point is that not all products or services need a CMS to inform their clients or potential clients. The same applies to Single Page Applications (SPAs); In some contexts, a CMS can be useful and sufficient for the project, or even a simple static web page of a lifetime.

So, if your website is for a foundation or a restaurant that simply has to inform its users or customers about its hours, phone number, addresses, or Menu, it is very likely that you do not need a Single Page Application for everything. a system of modules, plugins, and states behind.

Thanks to these modern approaches, paradigms, and frameworks, it is very easy not to want to stay out of fashion. But, if you want to be environmentally friendly, a professionally developed, a static website is much easier to render for the device, then much more friendly.

Both the server and the devices will have to do less work and naturally use less energy to display your website.

If you do not see it, having you as a user, think about the number of times you access a website that consumes a lot of data during a day and extend this thought to all the other users who do the same. How do you think the infrastructure is configured to support this job? spend energy?

Simplify Your JavaScript

Some websites can survive – even the businesses they represent – using pure JavaScript. However, once again, modern frameworks are too conspicuous to be ignored, and it is very easy to start developing web applications with them.

Pure JavaScript allows you to control, from the start, the amount of code needed for a feature. But if you’re creating static websites it’s very important to take into account what you’re writing, from the start, and how it behaves in your users’ browser.

Also, minified (compressed) JavaScript indeed helps with load times, but the browser must uncompress to process it, and in some cases, it can have side effects from a computational and environmental point of view, as more processing means more overhead. energy.

Remove Dependencies

How many times have you done yarn add or npm install and forgotten which package you installed? These actions also generate CO.

If you want to make an environment-friendly website, I recommend setting aside time on your to-do list, or even a budget to do package and dependency cleanup.

Even analytics scripts you’ve used in a marketing campaign, but never used again. This also applies to your A/B tests, your cookie-fed content, or those pretty web fonts, which came with the template and you no longer use, because the client wants to use theirs.

Also, check if the dependency you want to install is not already native functionality in all modern browsers. As we saw last week, CSS for example has grown a lot this year in 2020 and allows you to program with less verbosity after integrating new features and properties that you could only use before through libraries or plugins.

Use CDNs Close To Your Users

We have commented several times in this blog that the farther your data has to travel, the more energy it will use. With CDNs, you can efficiently send data to your users using the shortest route possible, if they have servers nearby. This improves latency, performance, and thanks to edge computing you can go one step further.

Conclusion

These are just a few ways you can use to make your website green. You can implement them for 2021, or you can do many other things, like delete your website if you don’t use it anymore, and nobody visits it. If you need one for testing, you can have a very cheap local server. 🙂

If you have other formulas to help alleviate a global problem such as the ecological footprint that websites leave on our planet, do not hesitate to comment below!

Do you think your website has any responsibility for climate change?