Building Green Websites for Sustainable Businesses

Everyone has a website nowadays. But while you might have content on your site that marks you as a sustainable business, are you doing everything to make sure your website itself is green?

In 2009, the Times reported that two simple Internet searches via Google had approximately the same carbon footprint as boiling a kettle for tea. Although the article's findings were retracted - with Google noting that the CO2 emissions from a search taking less than a second produces about 0.2g of CO2, not the 7g initially reported. But although the data from the article was inaccurate, the point that the Internet consumes a vast amount of energy and produces a substantial amount of waste still stands. But there are many steps companies can take in order to make their websites more eco-friendly.

Here are three green tech tips for your site:

Hosting: One of the best ways to make your website green is to make sure the company hosting your site is green. Eco Host Reviews is one site that will help with your selection. It reviews web hosts in terms of the energy usage offset using a carbon credit, servers that are powered by renewable energy and that are optimized for energy efficiency, and that subscribe to environmentally friendly practices.

Simplify Your Web Design: Websites that take a long time to load are usually discouraged, as customers often lose patience and interest while waiting for everything to appear on-screen. But there are other reasons to optimize your website to load quickly. The longer it takes your website to load, the more energy is used - both on the server and on the user end. You can simplify your website by making sure your images are compressed and optimized for the web and by using fewer complex graphics and widgets (such as Javascript and Flash). And while old CRT monitors used to use more energy when displaying light colors, today's LCD monitors use more energy to display darker ones.

Create Print-Friendly Versions of Your Content: Although ideally we'll move to a paperless office, there are plenty of occasions where people still want or need to print out information they've found online. If possible, make information downloadable into print-friendly PDFs. Printfriendly offers a widget for your site, as well as a service that transforms any webpage into a version that'll use less paper when printed.

There are lots of little things you can do to make your website more green and to reduce its impact on the environment. Just simply making sure your website loads quickly is an easy and important step in helping your sustainable business create a green website.