How much negative impact can a website really have?
Our little website with 4 main pages, a few extra pages like our Privacy Policy, a handful of supporting pages (like “thanks for signing up” etc), plus an archived page for every daily email sent since January (approaching 200), could produce up to 58kgs of carbon in a year.
That’s enough to power an electric car journey from Sydney to Melbourne. Our website needs 3 dedicated trees of it’s own just to absorb the emissions each year, assuming we added no more content.
That really surprises me. Our website is not big, we use hardly any images and we have no videos up there. Much of that is likely caused by our platform (WordPress) and the bloated code that comes with it, which can be improved.
The Website Carbon calculator that delivered these results doesn’t yet recognise our hosting company as a “green” host – it references the list of hosts on The Green Web Foundation, which our hosts have applied to but haven’t been approved for yet. Once they are, our score will improve by about 9%.
We’ll be making some changes to hopefully bring that number way down, so I’ll share what we try and the results as they roll out over the next few weeks.
For self-employed creatives, normal business traps are easy to fall into and overcomplicate things - but they’re totally avoidable when flying solo.
Learn how to keep things simple, enjoyable, and climate-smart in around 2 minutes a day by joining The Climate Soloist.