Optimize your website’s performance

If you’ve already used a green hosting provider for your website, that’s a solid foundation for having an environmentally friendly website. The next thing you need to consider is your website’s loading speed.

A slow website uses more energy to load . If your site is slow, it will require a lot of processing power from the server for each visitor who loads it. This means your site produces more carbon emissions.

Improving your website’s loading times will result in reduced energy consumption, undeniably improve the user experience for your website visitors, and ultimately, you’ll have a more environmentally friendly website. Here are some practical tips to improve your website’s loading speed:

• Optimize your use of images

To improve your website’s loading speed, you need to optimize how you use images on your site. First, think about the images you use and reduce them by removing unnecessary ones and/or concentrating them into single files. Second, prioritize critical images and load them first—those above the fold should be loaded first, while non-critical images can be lazy-loaded, after critical images or when they are needed. Next, compress image sizes as much as possible without compromising their quality. Finally, leverage caching for static images to minimize redundant user requests.

• Take advantage of website caching

To further increase your website speed, take advantage of one of the most powerful technologies: caching. Moreover, it can be applied at different levels of your website: the server level and the browser level. Server-side caching reduces website load times by keeping a copy of the web page on the server. SiteGround customers benefit from three levels of server-side caching – Nginx Direct Delivery for static content, Dynamic caching for dynamic content, and Memcached (for object caching). Browser caching, on the other hand, can also significantly reduce your site load times – when a user visits a website more than once, their browser loads the cached version of the page, stored on their device.

• Use a CDN

To further increase your website speed, use a Content Delivery Network (CDN). A CDN distributes copies of your website to users in different geographical locations by loading your website from servers located closer to the end user. SiteGround customers use our free, in-house CDN , which provides their websites with extremely fast loading speeds, requires no configuration on their part, and is easy to manage. However, there are certainly many paid CDN products and options.

• Rid your website of excess weight

Decluttering your website should be as routine as spring cleaning your house. Certain pages, plugins, themes, redirects, files, content, and more slow down your website and increase its carbon footprint. Here are some things to keep in mind when cleaning out your website:

First, get rid of unused plugins and themes, as the rule is simple: “the less code, the faster your site.” Next, remove outdated content and files from your site. These take up space on your site and slow it down further. Finally, reduce unnecessary redirects that affect site speed by adding extra steps to the page loading process—keep your pages and content just a click away. To further clean up your site, discover more techniques in our blog post.