Measuring carbon footprint

Knowing the carbon footprint of a website is the first step in reducing its carbon footprint. But this isn't an easy task, luckily there are tool like: https://www.websitecarbon.com/ , that tell you the amount of carbon emitted per page visit. So not exactly the entire carbon footprint (which includes development as well) but a good approximation. This is what we try to optimize and compensate for. (PS. make sure to check the carbon score of our own WebSite, proof is in the pudding as they say 😉)

SEO and carbon footprint

Another thing very important to us when making websites is that they have great SEO. Optimizations for SEO and carbon output have a ton of overlap so they go perfectly hand in hand! For example for good SEO a fast page load important and a way to ensure a fast page load is to minimize the bytes on the page. And the fewer the bytes on the page the fewer the bytes that have to be send over the wire. Optimizing images also help to reach this goal. Interested in how our website scores for SEO? Take a look below or test our website with lighthouse for yourself.

Green energy

We develop our websites using green energy (you can specifically choose energy plans that provide green and local energy). But not only that our hosting platform Netlify uses sustainable energy, want to know how they provide their services with sustainable energy? Check out their page on sustainability: https://www.netlify.com/sustainability/

Trees to the rescue

Even when considering all of the above every page visit on one of our websites (including the page you are watching and reading now) will emit some co2. For example our own site will emit about 0.11 grams of co2 per page visit (depends on each page of course but this is a good estimate).

So to make sure our the carbon footprint of the websites we make is truly neutral or even better negative we make sure enough trees are planted to offset the co2 emissions. For most sites a single tree is enough, but if your site gets tons of visitors per month we will scale up in trees (yes even our tree service scales with your website needs). For most trees we use a service that will plant a native tree but if you want and have the space we will provide and plant a native tree, just tell us where to plant it and we will bring and plant the tree ourself.

Ooh yeah this little guy is the tree that makes our website carbon neutral.