The environmental impact of websites and hosting
A 2017 study concluded that the ICT industry could account for 20% of all electricity usage and emit up to 5.5% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2025. By 2040, data centre pollution is expected to grow to almost 14% of the world's carbon emissions, as much as the entire United States of America.
The question remains; why is the situation getting worse, and what can businesses do to combat the often unseen yet damaging effects of the internet?
The obvious reason is that the number of websites is ever growing. There are over 1.9 billion registered websites currently although only 25% are 'live', with the rest either parked or inactive domains. Regardless, the size of the internet has grown 30% a year on average since 2010, and this means more servers and ultimately, more energy to power them.
Data consumption of websites is also growing, with an upwards trend in the amount of code, imagery and content they contain. In just 10 years, the average web page has quadrupled on desktop from ~500 kb to ~2 MB. On mobile, it's grown tenfold from ~150 kb to ~1.8 MB.
Test the environmental impact of your Shopify website
Online tools, such as Website Carbon (developed by our good friends over at Wholegrain Digital 👋), allow users to see what goes on behind the scenes of their website, transforming data into simple, actionable snippets.
The tool focuses on five key data points to generate an estimate of the environmental impact of a given website;
- Data transfer - The amount of data transferred by a web page, multiplied by its energy usage data and automatically adjusted to account for cached pages by repeat visitors.
- Energy intensity - An average figure of 1.8kWh/GB, based on the average amount of energy used by data centres divided by the total annual data transfer over the web.
- Energy source - Checking whether the data centre used is currently listed on the Green Web Foundation (GWF) database.
- Carbon intensity - Based on the international average of 475 grams CO2 per kWh for non-renewable sources, and 33.4 grams CO2 per kWh for renewable energy.
- Website traffic - Carbon per page view multiplied by average annual views.
For positive scores, the tool includes a code-based badge that can be embedded with just a few lines of code to the footer of any Shopify website. Businesses can proudly display this whilst also encouraging others to think about how their own website might be negatively affecting the environment.
What is Shopify doing to combat climate change?
Sustainability and the environment are a big focus for Shopify. They're working hard to bring businesses and their customers together in the fight against climate change.
Here are some of the ways their team has been tackling the climate crisis in recent years, and their plans for the future:
💵 Investing in an Annual Sustainability Fund
Shopify have pledged $5M annually to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by getting directly involved with new technologies and partnering with like-minded organisations that share the same core beliefs.
To do this, they've identified ten industries, split into two portfolios, that the team believes will help combat climate change directly:
Shopify's Frontier Portfolio occupies 76% of the annual fund and focuses on new technologies that aim to completely remove CO2 from the atmosphere, including;
- Direct air capture.
- Storing carbon into products and construction materials such as concrete and cement.
- Reducing ocean acidification.
- Chemically sequestering air-based CO2 into solid minerals that can be stored.
- Collaboration and investment with existing climate-first organisations.
Their Evergreen Portfolio is focused more on temporary but urgent steps that help reduce current carbon emissions. These solutions utilise the remaining 24% of the sustainability fund, by focusing on solutions like;
- Planting new trees and protecting existing forests.
- Using innovative farming techniques to promote soil health and its inherent carbon-storing properties.
- Focusing on alternative fuel sources that cause less damage to the environment.
- Reducing and offsetting transport emissions.
☁️ A platform-wide shift to Google Cloud
Starting in 2018, Shopify decommissioned all of its physical data servers and moved its entire platform to Google Cloud, a green hosting solution powered by 100% clean, renewable energy.
Alongside general speed and performance benefits, cloud hosting is often a much more environmentally-friendly way of managing and sharing online data.
Unlike a dedicated hosting approach where servers run the risk of being under used while still drawing the same amount of power, a cloud-based approach means that individual server capacity is shared between businesses.
This ultimately results in fewer servers, utilising less physical equipment, running much more efficiently and drawing far less power than their dedicated counterparts.
🏡 LEED-Certified office spaces
LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design), is the most widely used rating system in the world for green buildings.
Points are earned based on a number of ranking factors including:
- Whether native or adaptive vegetation covers at least 20% of the total site area to provide habitat and promote biodiversity.
- How easily and available public transportation links are.
- Whether bicycle facilities are available.
- Whether water is being metered and how efficiently its being used.
- What steps are being taken to minimise light pollution
These points are then collated and turned into one of four ratings;
- Platinum (80+ points earned)
- Gold (60 - 79 points earned)
- Silver (50 - 59 points earned)
- Certified (40 - 49 points earned)
Currently, 51% of Shopify's office spaces are ranked LEED Certified or above, resulting in more energy-efficient working environments that have a reduced impact on the planet.
How can I improve the environmental impact of my Shopify website?
Here are some simple ways you can make your Shopify site that little bit more environmentally friendly:
🧭 User journeys / experience
It's a common misconception that the total time a user spends on your website, or the bounce rate (percentage of users who leave your site after only visiting one page), are key to your website's search engine ranking.
The longer a user spends on your Shopify website, the more energy they consume. There can be real environmental benefits from minimising the amount of time a user spends visiting your online store.
In e-commerce, a sustainable goal should be guiding a user through their purchase journey in the shortest time possible.
Simple things like a one-page checkout not only minimise the loading of additional and unnecessary pages, they can also increase your conversion rate and even generate more sales.
Cut down on unnecessary page visits with efficient content linked to the key words your customers are searching for. Alongside this, a clear SEO strategy will help to put your site in front of the right people. Finally, guiding organic traffic to the right place can also help bring down the carbon footprint of internet users outside of your own customer base.
📷 Website images
High-quality image use has grown massively over the past ten years, and accounts for between 40 - 60% of average page weight when a user loads a site for the first time.
With any website, it’s crucial that self-hosted images are compressed for faster loading times. The key is to strike a balance between crisp quality and low file size. As a general rule, something between 150 kb - 250 kb works best.
Free online tools like Optimizilla or TinyPNG are easy and effective ways of compressing images for those who don't have access to editing software like Adobe Photoshop.
🔤 Custom fonts
Each time a web page with custom fonts is loaded for the first time, CSS code and a JavaScript request occur. The font file is then downloaded and temporarily stored on a user's machine so they can view the page properly.
If your website uses third-party typography from sources such as Adobe Fonts (previously Typekit) or Google Fonts, an extra connection is often made in order to validate whether you are properly licensed to use the chosen typeface on your website.
To cut down on performance costs and unnecessary server requests, try avoiding custom fonts. Choose default fonts that a user will already have on their machine.
That said, if custom typography is an absolute must, consider converting fonts to a more efficient format such as WOFF or WOFF2. This can bring the total file size down by anywhere from 50% to 75%.
🧃 The products themselves
One of the best things a product-led business can do to reduce their environmental impact is consider how their products are packaged.
Research suggests that 88% of people who viewed BBC's Blue Planet II in 2018 have since drastically changed their behaviour when purchasing products that use plastic or non-recyclable packaging.
Consider asking your suppliers to reduce the amount of excess packaging used in the manufacturing and delivery of your products.
📦 Shipping and logistics
Smaller e-commerce businesses looking to improve their carbon footprint could consider offering local delivery for online orders. If your business operates at a large enough scale, consider utilising localised distribution centres nearer to your customers.
For US and Canada based Shopify websites, they also offer the use of their own distribution centres. This can save business owners time and help reduce postage costs, while cutting down on transport emissions.
Aim to be clearer when talking about your supply chain. If your business already has a clear environmental ethos, include a sustainability page or banner to go into more detail on what you're doing.