Check if your website is environmental friendly with websitecarbon.com

“The internet consumes a lot of electricity. 416.2TWh per year to be precise”. The text is written on websitecarbon.com and it is numbers like these that makes You open your eyes and realise that the internet might have a bigger impact on our CO2 emissions than You first thought. Since You found this article You might already be aware of the problem and wish to see how much you're website pollutes. But if You just stumbled upon this article by accident we will take a short moment to tell You how much the internet pollutes.

The internet or the so-called “World Wide Web” is accessible all over our earth and on the internet we have over 1 billion websites available to you at any time of the day. For every of these websites we need to run a server that will look for requests and access points in between to route the data back and forward between you and the data centre hosting the website. All of these requires electricity to run and sadly many of these data centres make use of old school coal energy. To put the polluting caused by the internet into perspective, then if the internet was a country it would be the 6th biggest polluter in the world.

Now that You know a bit about how polluting the internet is You probably also understand the importance of why we need to change the behaviour of the websites on the internet. Internet speeds become faster and faster and the same with our devices. Because of this we tend to build even more demanding websites instead of doing the opposite. In reality we could make the internet more accessible to people in areas with slow bandwidth and also lessen the pollution caused by every website if we just apply a few rules to our website. First step to a more sustainable internet is to check how bad your website pollutes and then fix it. In the next section we will explain how You can check your website.

Check if a single webpage is environmental friendly or check all your pages

WebsiteCarbon offers two types of environmental checks, either You can check a single webpage or You can add their script to your website so that all of your webpages gets checked when someone visits them.

To check a single webpage, simply go to https://www.websitecarbon.com. On the first page You will find a form where you can enter your URL and then You will receive your websites estimated carbon footprint.

If you rather want to regularly check all of your websites pages, then You can add the script from WebsiteCarbon’s website. The script tag will fetch a javascript file which will send your current URL to their carbon footprint measuring tool. Once the result has been calculated it will be sent back and the result will be shown directly on your website. This way your visitors can easily see how sustainable your website is and it also helps spreading the knowledge about the pollution caused by the internet.

If You are interested in reading about how WebsiteCarbon’s carbon footprint measuring tool is working, please check their FAQ here: https://www.websitecarbon.com/how-does-it-work/

Author

Michael Andersen

I am a self-taught and highly passionate web developer currently living in Sweden, where I use my skills to make the internet a better place through ethical and sustainable web design.