According to Website Carbon, a relevant British CO2 analysis service, each page view generates an average CO2 emission of 0.8g. It may not seem like much, but the mass effect is significant.
If all 8 billion people in the world were to visit one page, it would cause CO2 emissions of 6,400 tonnes. That's equivalent to about 3,200 intercontinental round trips of 8,000 km each in economy class.
Assuming that a tree can absorb about 20kg of CO2 per year on average, it would take 320,000 trees to offset the CO2 emissions of just one global page view. Not to mention that everything is released again when the trees die and decompose.
All this for a single page, which might just be clicked away.
Lazy Loading
The most effective strategy by far: load the contents of a page only when they appear in the visible area of the browser. The technique is old, known as Lazy Loading, and was originally developed for websites with many images or videos to speed up page loading. We apply it consistently to all content on a webpage.
No Database
Most solutions for creating websites, like WordPress, Joomla, or TYPO3, operate with a database. This means a page view requires resource-intensive interaction with the database, consuming additional energy and corresponding CO2 emissions. Modern methods are no longer reliant on a database to create websites. We have long freed ourselves from databases, which brings many benefits, such as much better interoperability with Artificial Intelligence. But also significantly better energy efficiency. And lower CO2 emissions.
Standards-compliant Websites
Even errors need to be processed. Careless use of templates and plugins quickly leads to bloated and erroneous code, which is not processed efficiently and causes increased CO2 emissions with every page view. In contrast, sleek and standards-compliant websites can be retrieved quickly and with low emissions.
Modularization
The consistent modularization of all web resources, such as CSS or JavaScript resources for the design and programming of a website, makes it possible to use them only when really needed. This also applies to fonts, which cause surprisingly high CO2 emissions. If the resources are not needed, they are not loaded, and thus do not cause CO2 emissions.
We combine various methods to reduce the CO2 emissions of a page view. Clearly with success. Website Carbon finds rarely more than an initial emission of 0.08g on websites created with our solution, compared to the average detected 0.8g, which is a reduction of 90 percent.