In 2023 the internet is responsible for approximately 3.7% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions which makes it the 4th biggest polluter in the world just below the aviation industry and demonstrates how our online behaviour has a massive impact on the climate.
Marketers are now beginning to understand that by building websites that are developed with sustainable coding practices they can enhance their website’s SEO performance level due to the fact that as we as consumers become more aware of our environmental footprint through our online behaviour, marketers will want to develop websites that support their client’s sustainability goals.
For many years technical SEO and Sustainability have had their own separate silos, however, they have generally not always been viewed as being interdependent. Therefore, this blog post/guide will assist you in learning how to use ‘clean’ coding practices when building your website, how to effectively optimise your website’s assets to reduce energy usage on your host server, and how both are ethical ways to develop websites as well as the basis or reasons why Google uses them when determining your ranking on SERPs (search engine result pages).
1. The Performance Bridge: Why “Green” Means “Fast”
Efficiency is essential to link sustainability and SEO together.
The energy used on the internet is directly related to how much data was transferred from the server to the user. Therefore, each kilobyte of information that gets sent from your web server to its user will consume more electricity, meaning that as you run more data through your website, you consume more energy. At the same time, high amounts of data transferred are one of the main reasons that a web page loads slowly.
Google uses Core Web Vitals (CWV) to measure how efficiently your website compares to other websites. Sustainable design focuses on green design solutions, therefore when you create a green website by using sustainable design you will have an automatically optimized CWV based on the three metrics that CWV uses for evaluation.
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Lean Loading created through green design; the amount of time it takes to see the main content of a webpage will be greatly reduced if you design for a green website.
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Avoiding unnecessary shifts in content through the use of large and heavy third-party scripts when developing eco-friendly sites will eliminate the force of layout changes and therefore reduce the incidence of visual jumps that annoy users.
- The Data Link: The HTTP Archive states that web pages have increased in size by almost 3 times their original size in the past 10 years and reversing that trend is beneficial in terms of reducing carbon emissions, but also beneficial in terms of providing users with a site that meets the performance requirements of Google.
2. Shedding “Digital Bloat” to Maximize Crawl Budget
Crawl Budget, which is the limit on how many pages Googlebot will index from any one source over a certain amount of time is the quota crawlers have to crawl sites.
Digital Bloat (too many javascript libraries, unnecessary CSS files, and messy HTML) makes it harder for the crawler to connect with a server, sending way more data than needed to the crawler, thus requiring many more CPU resources to process them.
If you have lots of code bloat on your site, Googlebot will run out of time to crawl before it sees your best pages.
Most companies who want to achieve this level of technical expertise often hire a local professional web development company in Noida for an audit of their codebase and implement energy-efficient coding practices.
How to optimize for energy and indexing:
- Code Minification: Minify code (reducing file size by removing whitespace and comments)
- Vanilla JS over Heavy Libraries: Use vanilla javascript instead of using larger libraries like jQuery.
- Clean Architecture: Use semantically correct markup since this gives additional info to search engine spiders about the structure of your content and reduces the CPU power and energy necessary to process your pages.
3. Image SEO: Reducing Carbon While Increasing Rank
The biggest contributor to a website’s carbon footprint are the media files on that site. Most high quality images and automatically playing videos have an impact on the ability of users to use mobile devices, which is important as Google is moving to Mobile-First Indexing.
Therefore, “Smart Media” has a favourable impact on Sustainable web development and optimising visual assets will improve your image SEO and provide a substantial reduction in CO2-per-page-view.
- Use next generation formats: Use WebP or AVIF formats instead of JPEG or PNG formats. These formats are capable of providing a visually superior quality at a much lower file size.
- Lazy load: Load images only as they enter the user’s viewport. If the user never scrolls to the bottom of the page, those images are never rendered.
- Use videos strategically: Do not self-host large video files. Use compressed “click-to-play” formatted videos instead of looping automatically to ensure that the initial page load is not overly heavy.
4. Green Hosting: Is It a Ranking Factor?
Digital marketing professionals frequently inquire about whether there are advantages to using environmentally friendly web hosting providers. At this time, Google does not have a ranking factor for environmentally friendly web hosting services, however this sort of web hosting can indirectly provide significant Search Engine Optimization (SEO) benefits. Many environmentally friendly web hosting companies, many of which can be located through the Green Web Foundation’s site, typically utilize newer and more energy efficient technology, which translates to the following benefits:
- Decreased Time To First Byte (TTFB): due to using energy efficient solid state drives (SSD) and newer technology servers that process data quickly, results in having a lower average TTFB which has a critical impact on page load speed.
- The use of Edge Computing (CDNs): the proximity of a user to where they access data saved time and power consumption for transferring data.
- Increasing Trust & Credibility: the use of the Green Certified Badge can provide added trust to users, which can typically result in an increase in the number of click throughs and longer time spent on your site by users.
5. Sustainable UX: Improving Accessibility and Battery Life
A sustainable web development approach believes in a “minimal” User Experience (UX).
A sustainable UX means that it allows users to find everything they require in as few clicks as possible and with the least amount of screen time.
From an SEO perspective, that directly means lower bounce rates.
- Mobile + Energy Efficiency: Sustainable sites don’t create animations that are too CPU intensive; thus, they save battery life on mobile devices.
- Dark Mode Support: Dark mode saves energy on OLED screens, so including this feature will improve user comfort and session duration.
- Accessibility (A11y): There’s a 99% match between sustainable code and accessible code; therefore, using proper header structures (H1, H2, H3) and using alt-text will aid screen readers and search engine bots, as well.”
Conclusion
Sustainable web development isn’t going out of style. It’s evolution at work in a high-performance global network. The latest evolution is search engines favoring optimal user experience (UX) and speed as part of refining overall rankings on their results pages. The “greenest” websites will naturally rank high within search results overall. If your site’s overall environmental impact would be lowered through less digital waste and more efficient physical infrastructure, you will have created a company and product that are faster, more accessible, and much more visible than previous examples of your type, which will ultimately maximize profits for all involved.
Author Bio: Akshay is a content strategist at NetClubbed, a leading web development company in Noida, specializing in technical SEO and digital transformation. He helps businesses bridge the gap between sustainable web performance and search engine success through high-impact, data-driven storytelling.
