Reuben Digital's Green Health Check
The annual CO2 emissions from a website depend on many things. These include:
- Whether the website is hosted at a data centre using renewable energy
- The traffic/page views of your site – a more popular site will generate more CO2 emissions than a low-visitor website
- Data transfer over the wire – when a website is loaded, the energy used is roughly proportional to the amount of data transferred. There are lots of factors affecting how much data is transferred when a webpage loads on a device – from image size to fonts, to code, scripts and how the page data loads.
Some very clever people at www.websitecarbon.com have combined this data to get the emissions associated with an average user visiting any given website. Their Website Carbon Calculator multiplies “carbon per page view” by the number of annual “page views” and you get an estimate of the total annual CO2 emissions for any given website.
Disappointed by your website’s carbon rating?
It's common for websites to have lower scores due to factors like complex design elements or older coding practices. Did you know that since the Paris Agreement in 2015, the average web page size has increased by 85% on desktop and 165% on mobile, due to heavier-weight software. To illustrate this, in 2023 the International Energy Agency calculated that since 2010, the number of internet users worldwide has (only) doubled, while global internet traffic has expanded 25-fold. It's time to cut the bloat!
The good news is that there are simple changes - such as optimising images and implementing lazy loading - that can enhance your site's performance, reduce its carbon footprint, and even improve search engine rankings. To make this easier for you, we've created the Reuben Digital Green Health Check, a quick and cost-effective service to help boost your website’s sustainability and overall performance.
The good news is that Reuben Digital hosts all of its clients' websites with Microsoft Azure, and are therefore listed as running on sustainable energy. This information is collected from the Green Web Foundation database. Azure, as a part of Microsoft, has been 100% carbon neutral since 2012. This means they are removing as much carbon each year as they emit, either by carbon removal (carbon offsetting) or reducing carbon emissions. During 2025, Azure will shift to a 100% supply of renewable energy, meaning that they will have power purchase agreements (PPA) for green energy contracted for 100% of carbon-emitting electricity consumed by all their data centres, buildings, and campuses.
What are the benefits of improving the carbon rating of your website?
You mean, aside from saving the planet?! When the carbon rating of a site is improved, as well as using less energy to deliver the same message or service, there are also additional benefits:
- The site will perform faster with quicker page loading
- Better optimisation for search engines like SEO, leading to higher search rankings
- More enjoyable end user experience – quick, intuitive navigation – leading to fewer lost leads and higher sales
The benefits of adopting a sustainable business model...read more >
How can I improve my website’s score?
Reuben Digital’s Green Health Check is a quick and affordable service we can provide to improve the carbon rating of our existing clients' websites. Our no-obligation audit will provide a list of actionable improvements, including:
- Removal of unused third-party plugins to limit unnecessary code bloat
- Implementing lazy loading for images, ensuring off-screen images only load when needed
- Replacing JPG and PNG images with scalable vector illustrations and icons to reduce file size
- Switching to vector-based backgrounds to minimize large image downloads
- Reducing vector images file size with optimisation tools
- Implementing a lightweight, efficient web framework to reduce network request sizes
- Minifying CSS, JavaScript, and HTML files to speed up page load times
- Enabling browser caching for static assets to reduce server requests
- Optimising font loading to prevent layout shifts during page rendering
Our Green Health Check may also include recommendations such as:
- Font changes – the use of simple fonts already installed by default on most computers will avoid unnecessary HTTP requests
- Colour and styling – ensuring a clean design not cluttered by unnecessary images and assets that make page loading slower
- How to minimise the carbon emissions of videos
- Content layout and navigation changes, since the less time your customers take to find the information they are looking for on your site, the less energy they will use.
Contact us to receive your no-obligation quote, listing all actions which will improve your rating. And don’t forget, these updates will also bring the additional benefits of making your site faster and rank better on Google too!