Transcript, lightly edited for readability:
I wonder if you’ve ever thought about the environmental impact of your website, in terms of the amount of energy it takes to store and transmit the website files from the server to the user’s device? Or how much energy it takes to display a page of your website?
Website Carbon Calculator
There’s a really interesting website called Website Carbon Calculator. There you can enter your website address and click ‘Calculate’. It’ll crunch some numbers behind the scenes and give you a rating for your web page. It compares the web page you’ve tested against all the other pages it’s tested.
The home page of hellotechnology.co.uk scores an A, with the global average being somewhere just south of E. So that’s a pretty good rating. It’s also cleaner than 87% of all web pages globally. I’m pretty pleased with that.
When I designed my new website I purposefully wanted to make it lightweight and fast to load across all devices. I avoided using too many big images or video, and I’m reaping the benefits of that now with fast load times across the site.
Query Monitor
I’m using Query Monitor, in WordPress. It’s a plugin which will give you page generation times and various insights into how quickly your pages are loading. It can be really helpful when troubleshooting bottlenecks, or trying to work out what’s slowing your site down.
PageSpeed Insights
If you want another overview you can use PageSpeed Insights. Again, put in your website address and it’ll give you a report covering:
- Performance
- Accessibility
- Best Practices
- SEO
It will give you a checklist of things to look at, including things you could improve which might benefit those visiting your website.
You might not be sold on the environmental benefits of optimising your website in this way.
Perhaps you’re thinking, “AI and crypto currencies are using so much energy, is it really worth me optimising my individual website?”
Well, there is a direct correlation between website speed and conversions. So you might want to think about optimising your site in order to improve the experience for someone visiting your site. For every second it takes a page to load, the likelihood of that visitor becoming a customer reduces. This is especially important for e-commerce websites.
If you’re interested in looking into any of this then please go ahead and have a look at websitcarbon.com and Google PageSpeed Insights. If there’s anything you’d like to talk to me about, such as reducing your page load times, optimising images and video or generally improving the experience for your visitors then feel free to get in touch.