Does my website have its own CO2 footprint? What does a website have to do with global warming? And how can I make climate-friendly decisions here? Find out here...
For example, if your website contains a lot of moving graphics, your web browser will need more computing power to render the animations.
This computing power demands the graphics cards or the processor, which of course needs power.
The more moving images, the more videos, the more "golden handles" your website has, the more electricity it consumes and this electricity has to be generated somewhere. Usually from non-renewable energy sources.
Of course, a website is only a very very (very very) small drop compared to other electricity consumers. In this respect, the CO2 footprint of a single website is comparatively small. But there are now around 1.8 billion websites and even such mini extras are noticeable.
In addition, some websites contain programming errors. As a result, the browser is busy computing in the background and consumes more processor power even though the page is not active. You will notice this when your fan starts up and eventually runs at full speed to cool the processor.
But the decisive factor for your website's carbon footprint is the choice of hoster, i.e. the server on the internet on which your website runs. There are hosters who operate their data centers predominantly with renewable energies. As a website owner, you can also pay attention to this if this issue is important to you.
If you have always wanted to know the carbon footprint of your website, there are now a number of online calculators that you can use to obtain an approximate estimate.
We thought this one was quite chic. (Thanks to our partners Imperial fire for the tip!)