How Your Website Can Make Your Business Greener
Many businesses strive to be more eco-friendly. They might introduce recycling facilities at their premises, and they may even stop issuing customers with paper invoices and documents.
You might not know it, but your website can also help make your business greener. How is that possible, you might be asking yourself? Take a look at the following points to learn more about how you create a greener business through your website:
Carbon-Neutral Hosting
As you can imagine, millions of web servers worldwide run 24 hours a day, seven days a week. They use a lot of electricity and, according to the Website Carbon Calculator, all of the Internet combined consumes 416.2TWh of electricity each year.
Your business can be greener and stop contributing to such high electricity usage by hosting your website in a carbon-neutral data center. Thankfully, there are thousands of hosting companies out there that promise eco-friendly, carbon-neutral hosting.
Search Engine Optimization
There are two ways that search engine optimization or “SEO” can help your business be greener.
Firstly, SEO can help you cut down on unnecessary content and code on your pages. If your website’s pages are quick to load and read, you will reduce the energy needed to download data or display content on a screen.
The longer a page takes to load, the more electricity gets consumed by both the website viewer and the data center that hosts your site.
Secondly, a good SEO link building service can help divert consumers away from your competitors. It offers obvious business benefits, of course. But from an environmental perspective, consumers will spend less time:
Searching for the products and services that you sell, resulting in lower energy consumption and data bandwidth;
Avoid going to websites that aren’t quick to load or hosted on carbon-neutral servers.
Use a Plain White Background on Your Pages
Some people aren’t aware that certain colors mean computer and mobile device screens consume more power. Most computer monitors and laptops have LCD screens powered by either a fluorescent backlight or an LED one.
If the display has to produce a dark image, such as a black background on a web page, the energy consumed will increase compared to the same page with a white background. The difference in energy consumption is minimal, of course.
But, if you consider that thousands or even millions of people are potentially viewing your site content each day, the energy saved soon adds up to significant levels. Of course, that alone doesn’t make your business greener (it helps your site visitors be greener).
The other point to keep in mind is that a plain white background will mean your content gets served to website visitors quicker. That’s because there’s no extra code or graphic imagery to download, resulting in lower bandwidth and less energy consumed by your web server.
Digital Marketing
Finally, if you adopt a sole digital marketing strategy and drive potential customers to your website, your business will be making another step towards lower carbon emissions. The reasons are as follows:
Traditional print marketing uses lots of paper, energy, and other resources to produce flyers and brochures that get mailed to your target audience;
A PPC (pay-per-click) digital marketing campaign using Google is eco-friendly because Google’s IT infrastructure is now carbon-neutral. The company even aims to power its data centers solely with carbon-free energy by 2030;
Organic digital marketing campaigns can also help to reduce your firm’s carbon footprint.