How to Build a Sustainable Website: Eco-Friendly Web Design Practices

The convenience and sustainability of the Internet is a wonder that we all enjoy nowadays. However, despite those, there is a large payoff that comes from it. According to Tom Greenwood, the author of Sustainable Web Design, a lot of the choices we make in web work have a lot of impact on the environment. One study indicates that for two percent of world emissions, a lot of that falls on the Internet. 

In this blog, we’ll talk about how you can build a sustainable website! 

Lower Image Sizing

One common practice in web publishing and web design is the usage of big images and video content that showcases work and production. Unfortunately, the payoff is the carbon footprint of your website. Thus, you need to navigate a fine line: ensuring your website design is sustainable while remaining visually engaging. For companies that provide Web Design Services, take notes! 

A lot of these big images take up a lot of space. The average single webpage has 1MB of image data. In layman’s terms, that’s a lot. 

What you can do, however, is to optimize and size correctly your images. Use online tools like tinypng to compress your images; this will allow faster loading time for images and can benefit the environment! 

Declutter Your Content

The next step is to declutter the content. That means reviewing the content of your website and checking their quality. Once you clean up the content, you’ll have less to track. And you can maintain it much to a higher standard. 

It’s a win-win: easier to navigate, and better quality of content. As a result, the user experience becomes simply better – it’s cleaner, lighter, and even loads quicker! Take it as a W for Mother Nature, too! 

Restructure the Navigation

A messy navigation page in the site of a digital marketing agency like Carl Ocab Digital Marketing is a bad look. As with the case in any other site, a large site that has a messy structure fotr navigation gives your visitors a terrible user experience. It’s clunky, and that also messes up with your goals to achieve better web traffic. 

If you want a sustainable website, then your surefire strategy is to focus on the user. Think about the profiles – who are the people who would visit your site? After that, you may need to map out a clear and logical navigation structure that your visitors can go to. 

Compressed Code

Did you know? It’s possible to compress your code and scripts. Okay, that seems like a really sticky situation at first, but trust me, it’ll be worth it. We recommend checking in with your web developers to see if they’re using CodeKit because you can utilize it to compress the code size. 

If you compress the code, it’ll require less energy. And thus, this menas less of a carbon footprint. 

You may also want to ask your web developers if the current web layout uses a stable version of web tech. This way, you can make sure to maximize performance and security, and energy efficiency. 

Wrapping Up

Sustainability is one aspect of living that people often overlook a lot. It’s an afterthought to some, but it’s something that ideally we have to prioritze. Fortunately, it’s doable, even with website building! 

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