How Green Is Your Website?

Most people know that climate change is a real and imminent threat. And we can easily identify most of the big culprits like non-renewable energy and heavy transport. But most people don’t realise the climate impact of the Internet.

It is estimated that up to 4% of global carbon emissions are caused by the Internet. That’s roughly equivalent to the entire air travel industry, and more than the whole United Kingdom.

And as our Internet usage grows, so does its negative climate impact.

While this is concerning, as business owners this means we have an opportunity to make a difference by reducing the negative impact of our business websites.

Every time a user visits your website there are three major sources of emissions:

• The data centre where the website is stored
• The telecom networks that transfer the data
• The software and devices that display the website

Companies like Google are starting to address the first issue. They are now using more renewable energy in their data centres, and there already many green web hosting providers.

But while we can choose green website hosting, that choice is still limited. And even if all data centres used renewable energy it is still impossible for us to control the energy choices of the telecom networks and our individual website visitors.