The internet’s carbon footprint is similar to the entire airline industry, accounting for about 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions. With WordPress powering over 40% of all websites, it’s safe to say the sustainability stakes are high.
We conducted a survey of IT professionals to get their feedback on digital sustainability, and we’re happy to report that the future looks promising:
- 91% believe IT businesses have a duty to protect the environment
- 94% of respondents indicated willingness to switch to a greener alternative
- 89% are willing to pay more for environmentally friendly digital products
The prevalence of WordPress as the CMS behind nearly half the web means this mission carries outsized weight. A single WordPress site optimised for efficiency cuts server demand, lowers energy use and therefore emissions.
Multiply that by millions of sites, and the impact is profound.
Digital Sustainability in WordPress
Digital sustainability is all about reducing the energy consumption and resource waste tied to building and running websites.
It’s important to note that sustainability doesn’t have to be at the expense of performance; the choice isn’t one or the other.
As a hosting provider with more than a million packages hosted on our platform, we can safely say that it is possible to shrink the environmental impact of services like WordPress websites, email clients and applications without sacrificing performance.
Sustainability isn’t just an ethical consideration for the countless developers who strive to improve their websites, plugins and themes to be more efficient and reduce waste,: it’s a also a sound business decision.
With 67% of IT professionals ready to invest in green solutions, WordPress users can both meet market demand and provide a better experience for visitors.
Optimising WordPress for Energy Efficiency
Efficient code is the bedrock of a sustainable WordPress site. Every byte of data processed and transferred consumes energy, so leaner code directly reduces a site’s environmental footprint.
Small tweaks can yield big results. Danny van Kooten famously shaved 20 KB from his Mailchimp plugin, saving around 59,000 kg of CO2 a month across its users.
You don’t have to be a developer to make a difference.
Here are the fundamental improvements anyone can make:
Monitor performance
The first step on the journey to efficiency is to get an accurate account of what is going on. Use tools like Query Monitor to pinpoint resource hogging processes and plugins, and research lightweight alternatives.
Minimise plugins
Consider how users interact with your website. Do you have plugins installed that are not being used? Are there better solutions now than when you started?
Evaluate what is essential, and what can be gotten rid of, and your site will be more efficient.
Optimise images
Images dominate page weight. Logos should be SVGs where possible, and switch to WebP or AVIF formats to preserve image quality while reducing file size.
Lazy loading reduces the processing load on your server as elements generate when needed, and not in one big spike. This also uses less bandwidth.
Minify code
Code minification tools compress CSS and JavaScript, shrinking down files by stripping out the non-executable parts. This speeds up delivery without changing how things look and function.
If you work with WordPress and build websites, or provide hosting services for a living, there are business opportunities emerging alongside the growing demand for green services.
Pitching green consultancy and auditing client’s websites is a great way to drive additional revenue, help your customers achieve their sustainability goals, and reduce their carbon footprint.
Leveraging Caching and CDNs
Some of the biggest efficiency and performance gains come from outside WordPress. Caching and content delivery networks are essential for running fast, environmentally friendly websites.
Caching plugins
Performing the same processes over and over again is often unnecessary, and always inefficient.
Cache plugins prevent needless server strain by creating static versions of the dynamic content on your web pages.
Instead of processing the entire page and then serving the results when a user visits, these static, pre-processed versions of your site are ready to be served in an instant.
This approach is not only more efficient; it’s quicker, and yields a better experience for your users.
CDN
A Content Delivery Network is a collection of servers placed at strategic locations near to your users.
These servers are preloaded with copies of your website content such as images, videos, scripts and entire web pages.
When a user visits your website, the server that’s physically closest to them delivers the content that’s being requested.
This vastly reduces latency, and it takes far less energy to load content from a server a few miles away compared to an origin server on the other side of the world.
Optimisation settings
If the site you’re optimising isn’t updated very often then fresh copies of cached content don’t need to be fetched and processed very often.
The best caching and CDN solutions allow you to manually set optimal cache lifetimes, which pushes performance and energy preservation even further.
Hosting providers and resellers can market caching and CDN technologies as a sustainability perk as well as a performance boost.
Offering websites that are faster and have a smaller carbon footprint is a net positive (pun intended) for you and your customers.
The Role of Hosts in Sustainable WordPress Sites
The servers, networking and internet connectivity, redundant systems and cooling techniques used in data centres consume a lot of energy.
Green focused, forward thinking hosting providers meet these high energy demands through careful planning, deploying efficient hardware and software infrastructures, and using renewable energy.
This makes it possible for data centres – even the largest – to be powered by 100% green, renewable energy and entirely offset their carbon footprint.
Here’s what to look for when choosing a hosting provider:
Renewable energy
Seek providers that use wind, solar, hydropower and other forms of renewable energy.
A commitment to sustainability reflects a provider’s forward-thinking infrastructure investments, and is a strong indicator of how good your experience will be in the future.
Efficient data centres
Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) is the metric used to determine the energy efficiency of a data centre.
Lower PUE measurements are better, and the most efficient data centres achieve a PUE of 1.2 or lower. These well engineered, energy-optimised data centres are the ones you should choose to take care of your green hosting requirements.
Modern, managed WordPress hosting
The best hosting providers include dedicated WordPress management tools that help with efficiency, are easy to use, and help with security. Here are key features to look out for:
- Automatic updates deploy any efficiency improvements, along with performance and security optimisations, quickly and without any hassle.
- Checksum reports ensure WordPress core files haven’t been tampered with. This keeps your server from being exploited for nefarious, energy consuming purposes like cryptojacking through your website.
- Plugin management tools let you update, mange and remove plugins to keep your site lean, performant and secure.
- Staging environments enable you to keep your live site up and running while developing, refining and testing improvements in a safe, private environment. The energy used in maintaining the staging environment will be offset by your optimisations.
- Optimised setup processes and templates/blueprints are time-efficient and energy-efficient features that get you up and running in a fraction of the time it takes to go through the manual installation process . These are must-have feature if you build websites.
Efficient data centres and dedicated WordPress tools help you to stand out as a hosting provider as you’re able to offer what an increasing number of customers are asking for: green hosting.
Measuring and Communicating Sustainability
The carbon footprint of your optimised website is a story to share. It’s also a way of independently verifying your green credentials and build trust with your users.
Here are some of our favourite tools:
- Website Carbon Calculator: The original carbon calculator tool has recently been updated to be more accurate. Quantify CO2 emissions per page load, and embed their badge that shows visitors that your website is green.
- Green Web Foundation: This tool takes the URLs that you enter and determines if the website runs on renewable energy.
Transparency builds trust
Being able to externally verify your sustainability strengthens your sales pitch as web designers and hosting resellers, and will help you win new clients and retain existing customers.
You can add a “Sustainability” page to your website where you show off your credentials and outline the optimisation steps that we’ve covered in this article.
Final Thoughts
WordPress’s 43% market share means users hold a great deal of power to help the platform achieving its full, green potential.
With more buyers eyeing eco-friendly solutions, the appetite for change is clear. The community can strive towards sustainability, site by site.
Optimising your website, using caching and CDNs, choosing a green hosting provider and carrying out yearly audits shrink your environmental footprint and increase performance.
Our position as a hosting provider gives us insight into how WordPress users, developers, marketers and resellers continue to take the reins and adopt practical, performance-friendly and environmentally sound practices.
A fully sustainable future for WordPress is achievable.
The web’s future is green, and WordPress users are already leading the way.
