Carbon footprint on websites is a very shocking theory or subject for us. The Internet is a more valuable thing right now. The Internet must be a virtual place, but it still has an impact on our environment. Internet carbon emissions come more from data centers but we don’t even realize it. Without electricity, we can’t use computers, laptops, etc. Without electricity, data centers don’t work. Everything that we search on the web emits C02.

For example, mailing, social media posts published, video watching, article reading everything costs us energy.

How do websites produce CO2?

As we mentioned above, every online action, including every interaction with your website results in electricity being used. For instance, whenever someone visits your website, their browser needs to make an HTTP request to your server asking for information. Your server needs to respond to this request and return the necessary information. Whenever this happens, your server spends a small amount of energy to complete the request. On the other side, the browser also needs the power to process data and present the page to the visitor.

And that outcome of energy produces C02.

How can we measure the website's carbon footprint?

Calculating the carbon emission for the web is a difficult system because of constant changes. There are some factors that contribute to carbon emissions.

These are :

• The number of servers.

• Their location,

• How much electricity they use,

• How much power each server uses

• Manufacturing the server

• The type of connection (3G, 4G, 5G)

• Web data transfer

We can measure the carbon footprint by page viewers ( per year) if a page has 100 viewers it produces 0.6kg or 600 g. For 500, 1000, and 5000 page viewers the carbon footprint is like 3.0 kg, 6.0 kg, 30.0 kg. (it’s a reference).

How to reduce a website's carbon footprint?

There are several things we can do to minimize the carbon impact of our websites.

These are :

• Choose a suitable hosting

• Choose a green hosting provider

• Reduce the size of your images and videos

• Regularly check content

• Keep your code simple

• Reduce the image size

• Work on improving the SEO of your websites