15 Useful Tips to Reduce Webpage Energy Consumption 

Introduction

The internet has a significant impact on the environment. 

A recent study reveals that digital technologies are responsible for 4 percent of greenhouse gas emissions. And the energy required for sustaining the internet is increasing by 8 percent a year. 

All videos and images uploaded and shared online take up a lot of space, and that space needs to be housed in data centers, which use up a lot of energy. This energy often comes from dirty sources, like coal plants. 

To give you a more concrete perspective of how much power the internet consumes, watching a half-hour show online leads to 1.6kgs of carbon emissions.

But what can you do about it? 

There are several ways to increase the energy efficiency of your website. This post outlines 15 valuable tips to reduce webpage energy consumption. Some are easy to implement, and some require a little more effort, but they’re worth trying.

How Much Energy Does A Website Use? 

The energy consumption of the internet ranges from 0.004 kWh/GB to 136 kWh/GB. Going by these figures, the average website consumes as much energy as two refrigerators. 

Servers are one of the biggest energy consumers when it comes to websites. They use a lot of power to stay online and running all the time. One server can use between 500 to 1,200 watts per hour. 

If the average use is 850 watts per hour, multiplied by 24, that equals 20,400 watts daily, or 20.4 kilowatts (kWh).

Useful Tips to Reduce Webpage Energy Consumption

Web Hosting

1. Enable Server Caching

Have you ever visited a website where the logo loads first, then the menu bar pops up, and finally, the rest of the website’s content appears. This slow process occurs because the webmaster hasn’t enabled server caching. 

Server caching stores a copy of your website’s static files (like images, CSS files, and JavaScript files) on the server so that it doesn’t have to generate them every time someone visits the site. This reduces the number of requests your server has to handle, which in turn cuts down on energy consumption.

It’s a pretty simple process to enable server caching, and all you need to do is follow these three steps:

• Log into your hosting account control panel. 
• Navigate to the caching section.
• Enable server caching and specify how long you want files to be cached for.

2. Switch to a Web Hosting Service With a High PUE Rating

PUE stands for Power Usage Effectiveness. It’s a measure of how efficient a data center is. The higher the PUE rating, the more efficient the data center. Hosting providers with a high PUE rating are best for your website because they use less energy, which means your website will consume less energy overall. 

How can you find out a hosting provider’s PUE rating? 

Reading online reviews is a great start. Ideally, your web hosting service should display this information publicly on their website. Otherwise, contact them and ask. Once you have a few PUE ratings, you can compare them to see which provider is the most efficient.

3. Use the Latest PHP Version

PHP is a scripting language used on web pages to generate content. It stands for Hypertext Preprocessor and is a widely-used open-source language. When it comes to energy efficiency, using the latest PHP version is crucial. 

The older versions of PHP were not as efficient as the latest one, so using the latest version can help reduce the amount of energy your website consumes.

The newest PHP version—PHP 8.1—has been designed with energy efficiency in mind. You can update your PHP version by going to your hosting control panel and selecting the “PHP Settings” option. From there, you can select the latest PHP version from the drop-down menu.

4. Use a CDN to Handle Static Website Assets

You may not be familiar with the term CDN, but you’ve probably used one before. A CDN, or Content Delivery Network, is a network of servers that helps deliver static website assets — like images, data objects, and documents — quickly and efficiently. 

If you’re running a website, using a CDN is a great way to reduce your energy consumption and improve page load times. Some of the best CDN providers are Cloudflare, KeyCDN, Amazon CloudFront, and StackPath.

To use a CDN, sign up for an account with any of these providers, then upload your static website assets to the CDN. 

You can do this manually or through a plugin or script if you’re using a content management system like WordPress. 

Finally, configure your website to use the CDN for static assets. You can adjust this through your website’s settings or in the code of your pages.

5. Choose a Data Center That’s Closest to Your Users

A data center is a large, centralized warehouse of computer servers. It’s a physical location where your website’s data is stored. 

Now, you might be thinking: doesn’t it make more sense to have my website’s data stored close to me? The answer is yes! 

Having a data center that’s located close to your users is one of the best ways to reduce your website energy consumption.

How does it work? 

When users visit your website, their browser sends a request for the website’s files. This request is then directed to the closest data center, which minimizes the amount of data that needs to be sent over the internet. So, endeavor to find out where your users are and choose a data center closest to them.

Website Design & Content

6. Improve Your Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Improving your search engine optimization (SEO) reduces your website energy consumption. But what is SEO? And how does it increase the energy efficiency of your website? 

Simply put, SEO is the process of optimizing your website for Google and other search engines. And when you optimize your website for search engines, you make it easier for people to find. 

This means they’re less likely to click on one of your competitor’s websites. By making your website available to many people, they spend less time browsing and visiting pages that don’t meet their needs. 

To improve your SEO, you must create high-quality content that is relevant to your audience. You must also use relevant keywords throughout your website, including your title tags and meta descriptions. Then optimize your website for mobile devices and build backlinks from high-quality websites. 

7. Implement Copywriting Strategies

Copywriting is all about persuasion. You’re using your words to convince people to take a specific action, whether it’s signing up for your mailing list, buying your product, or simply reading more of your content. 

Copywriting increases the energy efficiency of a website by helping users to accomplish their goals quickly and reducing the amount of time they spend hopping from one site to another. The shorter time they spend online, the less energy they use. 

One essential copywriting strategy is focusing on benefits rather than features. When you talk about the features of your product, you’re telling people what it does, but when you talk about the benefits, you’re telling them what they can do with it. 

Another great technique is to use testimonials from happy customers. Social proof is one of the most powerful forms of persuasion, and when people see that others have had a positive experience with your product or service, they’re more likely to want to try it out for themselves.

8. Optimize User Experience (UX)

User experience is how a person feels when using a product. And when it comes to websites, user experience is a huge factor in how energy-efficient the website is. 

If a website is challenging to navigate or the images are slow to load, the user will be frustrated. And that frustration will result in them leaving the website. 

Studies have shown that 53 percent of users will leave a website if it takes more than three seconds to load. Now imagine they have similar experiences with other websites while trying to find something online. It doubles the time they spend on the internet and, thus, increases their energy usage. 

You can ensure a positive user experience by using easy-to-read fonts and minimal graphics. Hire an experienced user experience professional to optimize your website design and keep it clutter-free. 

9. Compress Images and Graphics

Uncompressed images take up more space on your server, which uses more energy to store and run. They also require more bandwidth to load, which increases your website’s energy consumption. And they can slow down your website’s loading time, making your visitors wait longer for your content to appear. 

Images and graphics are an essential part of any website, but you need to optimize them for speed and efficiency. 

If you’re not compressing your images and graphics, you’re wasting bandwidth and making your website load slower than it needs to. You can compress the images and graphics with a website builder software like Bubble or Webflow. 

10. Reduce Video Size and Usage

You can reduce the energy consumption of your website by reducing the size of the videos you have on it. But reducing video size isn’t the only thing you can do; you also need to think about when you need video content and when it’s unnecessary. 

For example, suppose you’re running a website that’s purely informational. In that case, you don’t need too many videos except those showing users how to navigate or use a product or service. Videos are great for storytelling and creating a personal connection with your audience, but if they’re not necessary for your website, then don’t use them. 

Ensure your videos are encoded in the right format. Most video encoding formats are not energy efficient, so make sure you use a format like H.264 or MPEG-4 designed for streaming.

Development

11. Minimize HTTP Requests

Your website may also be using so much energy because it processes several HTTP requests. An HTTP request is a signal from your browser to the server asking for a specific file. 

And each time your browser makes a request, it takes up valuable energy. So the more requests your page makes, the more power it uses up. 

To reduce the number of requests your website makes, minimize the number of files you embed on your page. Use a CSS sprite instead of images for style changes. 

A CSS sprite is a single image containing all the images you need for your website. By using CSS sprites, the browser only needs to download a single image.

12. Use Asynchronous Loading for CSS and JavaScript Files

Asynchronous loading is a technique that allows all your CSS and JavaScript files to load separately. This means that your website can start loading the content it needs right away without waiting for all of the files to finish downloading. As you can imagine, this is a huge energy saver. But how do you activate async loading on your website?

One way is to use the async attribute on your tags. This tells the browser that it can go ahead and download the file as soon as it’s available without waiting for the rest of the page to finish loading. Another way to do it is to use a JavaScript library like jQuery to load your files asynchronously. 

jQuery has a built-in function called AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript) that allows you to load files without blocking the rest of the page. If you’re not using jQuery, you can also use the standard XMLHttpRequest object to load files asynchronously.

13. Use Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

AMP is an open-source initiative that Google launched in 2015. They designed this initiative to make websites faster and more energy efficient. 

AMP pages are stripped-down versions of regular web pages that use limited JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. 

This might sound like a bad thing, but it’s actually an excellent idea for energy efficiency because it means that the user experience is prioritized over fancy design elements. 

Google also caches AMP pages, so they load quickly even on low-powered devices and reduce the amount of data users need to download on their devices. 

To enable accelerated mobile pages on your website, install the AMP plugin for WordPress, add tags to your pages, and enable caching.

14. Minify or Combine CSS and JavaScript Files

Minifying or combining your CSS and JavaScript files is a great way to reduce the energy consumption of your website. This process involves shrinking down your files to make them as small as possible. It can help reduce the amount of time it takes for your website to load, which in turn will consume less energy.

You can use a tool like Yahoo’s YUI compressor to minify your CSS files. This procedure will remove all the unnecessary whitespace and comments, making the file size smaller. Then Combine all your JavaScript files into one single file using a tool like JSLint. Another way to improve the loading time is to compress your files using Gzip.

15. Reduce The Number of Plugins on Your Site

Plugins are software that add extra features to your website. While some of them are essential, others can be pretty redundant. For example, you don’t really need a plugin to create a contact form. 

The contact form tool mostly comes with your theme. Plugins increase the energy consumption of your web page by adding extra weight and scripts. If your site is loaded with plugins, it will take longer for the page to load, which will use more energy. 

To reduce the energy consumption of your webpage, remove any unnecessary plugins. So how do you figure out which plugins are causing your website to consume too much energy? 

One way is to use the “Task Manager” in Chrome. This will show you which plugins use the most CPU power and Memory. If you see a lot of plugins in the list that you don’t really need, then it might be time to remove them from your site.

Improve Your Site’s Efficiency Using an Efficient Web Builder Software

A good web builder software can be a huge help when trying to reduce your website’s energy consumption. It can increase your website’s efficiency by optimizing your website’s code and design. 

With a well-rounded website builder, you won’t need to spend on various software to compress images and reduce the amount of code on your pages. It will have these features inbuilt to make your website faster and reduce the amount of energy it takes to load.

Besides, web builder software makes your life easy. It means you don’t have to use any coding language. You also get access to a vast library of templates and themes. So you can quickly create a great-looking website and save time and energy.