Creating an ecological website: 6 tips for creating low-consumption sites

This is a growing trend, and one that will certainly continue to gain in importance in the coming years: companies are becoming more and more interested in ecology. How can their environmental impact be minimized? How to act in favor of the climate? CSR logics are more and more present. Whether it is a simple marketing argument or a real mission that the company has imposed itself, ecology is becoming a business concern.

While digitalization continues to accelerate, at the same time it contributes more and more to pollution. Data centers, the rise of video, the cloud... Many companies are therefore asking themselves how to reduce the carbon footprint of their digital activity. One of the solutions consists in the creation of eco-friendly websites. These sites aim to use as few resources as possible, by removing certain non-essential elements. Let's discover together why creating an ecological website is interesting, on more than one level!

Why create an ecological website?

You may want to create an ecological website for several reasons. The first is to want to reduce the ecological impact of your business on the digital side. By reducing the resources required by your site, you reduce the electricity consumption it generates. A small gain, certainly, but to be multiplied by the number of Internet users who browse your pages.

The other argument that can be put forward for the creation of ecological websites is a more business argument. Fewer resources to load on your site means it will be faster. And faster sites tend to convert users better. In addition, loading speed is one of the SEO factors that Google takes into account. A faster site will therefore be more able to transform your visitors into customers, and will naturally increase its visibility.

Apart from the ecological argument, there is therefore a real marketing argument to take into account if you want to create a more ecological site.

Let's take a concrete example: the home page of Scroll.

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

6 tips for creating an eco-friendly site

How to create an ecological website? There is no single answer, but rather a multitude of tactics to put in place to reduce your ecological impact. Here are 6 tips to help you set that up.

Choosing an ecological hosting provider

In the web hosting market, we tend to talk about the most famous big names, like OVH or O2Switch. But there are lesser-known solutions that have their own specificities. Among them, some hosts have a green approach and offer offers that will limit your impact on the planet.

Ikoula is a French solution that offers you to host your site in Datacenters powered by energy from renewable sources. The servers are built using materials that require little energy, and they have developed, in-house, innovative solutions to reduce CO2 emissions.

Infomaniak is a hosting provider that also uses green energy and hydraulic energy. In addition, the company is involved in local, ecological and social associations.

PlanetHoster, finally, powers its datacenters 100% with hydraulic power and uses low-consumption servers. They are implementing other actions, which go beyond the simple framework of accommodation, to have a positive impact on the environment.

Limiting heavy and unnecessary resources

Some resources are heavier to load than others. Images, for example, are heavier than simple text. Les web applications can exchange numerous requests with the servers to function.

However, the prize goes to video, which is certainly the heaviest common resource. If you want to reduce the size of your page, avoid integrating videos directly into your site: promote links. If you still decide to keep videos on your site, make sure they're not autoplaying. Ask the user to launch them: so those who are not interested will not load this additional resource.

Compress and use web formats

We still see it very regularly, especially in terms of images: webmasters do not necessarily use images adapted for the web. As much as possible, try to use WebP or JPG formats, which allow you to maintain excellent quality on your images while reducing their weight.

Free tools exist to do this, like PNGtoJPG. Also use image compressors to reduce their size.

By converting an image from a PNG to a JPG and compressing it, you can easily reduce its weight by 90%! An easy, fast and very useful gain: the loading time of your pages will be greatly improved.

Use cache rules

On all websites, resources are repeated on almost every page: CSS files, Javascript, or even bits of HTML code. Cache rules allow you to save these resources directly in the user's browser. Each time this user has to load them, they will therefore be loaded from their browser, thus avoiding numerous back and forth trips with your server. The result: significant energy savings, and reduced charging times.

Choose a minimalist design

The more loaded the design of your website is, the more complex it is. And the more complex it is, the more requests it will take to load it. Favoring a clean and simple design therefore means saving the energy needed to load each of your pages. Use HTML and CSS over Javascript or other greedy languages. Limit the size of your code, carefully select the elements to be displayed: the planet will thank you!

Note that it is in no way a question of stripping your site of any visual identity. All you need to do is remove any superfluous items. This is not only beneficial for the planet, but also for the interface of your site, which is often simplified. Less is more.

Limit the number of plug-ins

This is a good practice that can be found on a lot of CMS, but especially on Wordpress. The latter allows you to personalize your site thanks to numerous plug-ins. Do you want to do something in particular? There is certainly a plug-in that will do it for you!

While this is one of the great advantages of this tool, it is also one of its major flaws. Indeed, each time you install a new plug-in, it leaves a trace in your source code and therefore slows down the loading times of your page, by increasing the number of requests required.

Other CMS exist, such as Webflow. Webflow is a No-code solution which is based on the principle of drag and drop: you add the elements you want directly to your page from the editor. By using Webflow, you won't have to install additional plug-ins: all the features are already present in the basic editor. A solution to develop sites more simply, while keeping a minified code!

Discover the ecological impact of your website

Do you want to measure the ecological impact of your website today? The site Carbon website offers you to do it for free. All you have to do is enter your site's URL to find out how much CO2 is produced each time a page is loaded.

Another tool, very practical, is Pagespeed Insights, from Google. The tool is not directly interested in ecology, but more in pure performance. But as we have seen, the two are closely linked! Enter the URL of your web page: you will get a score out of 100 which will tell you if the loading speed of your page is good or not. Google will then provide you with all the elements that take time to load: scripts, unused resources, superfluous code... It's up to you to sort out to keep only what is necessary!

Finally, a third tool, very complete: Ecometer. Ecometer will evaluate your page to tell you if it is eco-friendly or not. You will then get a list of concrete actions to put in place to improve your score and reduce the environmental impact of your website.

Scroll, an agency for the creation of ecological websites

At Scroll, we decided to develop websites that are both stylish, ergonomic, and ecological using Webflow. We take special care in UX, development, and hosting to ensure that sites are fast, convenient, and good for the planet. A winning solution for everyone!

Do you want to create an ecological website? Tell us what you need! A project manager will answer you, to offer you relevant and appropriate solutions!