Why worry about the carbon footprint of a website?

It might seem strange to think about the carbon and environmental impact of a website, but the internet is responsible for 2% of global carbon emissions, which is the same as the aviation industry.

This is because the internet is powered by data centres, which are essentially huge buildings and infrastructure filled with servers that store and process data.

These data centres need to be powered, secure and importantly - kept cool. Cooling requires a lot of energy. The energy used to power data centres is often generated by burning fossil fuels, which releases carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere.

How are we trying to reduce our carbon footprint?

• Hosting
  We currently use a hosting provider called Vercel, which is a carbon-neutral company and is committed to achieving net zero emissions by 2030.

• Code optimisation
  We've optimised our code to ensure that it's as efficient as possible, embraced caching and lazy loading where possible, and we've also removed any unnecessary code. This is ongoing work and we are always looking for ways to improve.

• Images
  Next.js automatically optimises our images for performance and we also fully embrace the modern image format WebP, which is 30% smaller than JPEG and PNG. Coupled with the fact that we use a CDN (Content Delivery Network) to serve our images, means that we're able to deliver images to you as quickly and efficiently as possible.

• Fonts
  We've fully embraced variable fonts meaning that we only need to load one font file, rather than multiple. This reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred to your device.

• Colours
  We've optimised our colour palette to ensure that we're using colours that are as energy-efficient as possible. White is the most energy-intensive colour to display on a screen, so we've embraced "dark mode" to reduce the amount of energy required to display our content.