6 steps to a greener website

We can take very simple steps to make our digital products much more ecologically sustainable. Begin with the ones that are the easiest for you and result in very little loading times and data requests. And always remember to love the process, not only the goal your walking towards.

Step #1: Eco hosting

Switch to a hosting provider such as Petricore, Manitu, BioHost or another hoster, that uses 100% renewable energies. With bog standard energy 475g CO2e/kWh are emitted, with energy from renewable resources only 33,4g CO2e/kWh (with a lot of dependencies of course) *

Step #2: Technical stuff

Optimize the technical base of your website by de-cluttering and compressing CSS and JavaScript, by deleting unused classes, using caching, reducing requests and avoiding redirects.

Step #3: Stakeholders

Map out and research all stakeholders of your website. Your target users, people who are involved in working on the website, people who are impacted by the content of the website and Mother Nature. Yes, Mother Nature is a stakeholder of each of our projects. You can read more about it in my blog post “Mother Nature as a persona”.

Step #4: Website content

Get your data weight small! Compress your images and videos. Avoid video auto-play and big animations. Use system fonts or only few special fonts. Optimize usability and keywords. Share what your doing in the topic of sustainability. Integrate green delivery, green product filters and promotions, online bills, etc.

Step #5: Raise awareness

Check your suppliers and their (digital) sustainability strategies, create life cycles for member data bases, talk about the importance of sustainable behavior on social media and other platforms, compensate what you can’t erase.

Step #6: Digital office

Check the digital services that you’re using (how sustainable are they?), use Ecosia as search engine, choose a green cloud service, de-clutter emails and documents on a regular basis and integrate planet earth into your design processes.