While browsing Mastodon recently I saw a post about the carbon footprint of websites. After reading the article I searched for how to find out the carbon footprint of a website and stumbled upon the Website Carbon Calculator. I was already aware of the carbon footprint of websites but I wasn’t too concerned about ours because it’s quite small and we use green hosting powered by renewable energy. We don’t have many pages or products so I thought it’d be fairly light. So I was shocked when the report said that our website was dirtier than 55% of all the websites tested by the calculator!
The Website Carbon Calculator doesn’t tell you what exactly is causing the problems so I used a tool called GTMetrix to see if it could shed some light on what is using up so much resource and energy. It turns out the culprit was primarily Woocommerce, the software we use to run the shop element of our website, loading lots of scripts on every single page, often for functions we don’t even use.
As a small business that prides itself on trying to operate sustainably we can’t go having a website this dirty so we’re now working on streamlining it and making it much lighter. Our options are either move away entirely from Woocommerce or remove a lot of the bloat that is making our current site so bloated. Given that we don’t currently have the funds for a full rebuild of our website, we’re going to do this in phases, starting with reducing the bloat on our current site. We have a testing version that is currently at 0.18g of CO2 per page load compared to our current 0.56g which is better than 82% of websites tested according to the Website Carbon Calculator.
If you run a website, give it a test with the carbon calculator. Hopefully you won’t be as horrified with the results as we were.
Oh and just in case you’re worried that you’ve burned up a load of carbon reading this article, I’ve intentionally not used an image and removed some of the bloat. According to the calculator this post is cleaner than 90% of pages tested and is reponsible for 0.09g CO2.