If the internet were a country, it would be the 4th biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

90% of the environmental impact of digital technology is linked to the production of our terminals: telephones, computers, connected objects, virtual reality glasses... if our priority as a society is to reduce our level of equipment , digital sobriety is also a matter of production: producing sites that are less energy-intensive, less greedy in storage space, and less demanding in terms of the performance of our terminals.

More than a method or an opportunity, eco-design is a responsibility for digital professionals; as an agency, our conviction is that a good eco-design strategy is a trajectory that can be measured, modeled and optimized , at all stages of the creation of a website.



In this article

– Define a carbon trajectory for your website
– Model your impacts in UX/UI
– Apply best practices during development
– ​​Optimize your content
– ​​Choose your host
– Measure and declare your environmental performance
– Coming soon: the environmental declaration for everyone!


Define a goal: the essential carbon trajectory of your website
First step in your eco-design strategy: include your website project in a carbon trajectory , i.e. be able to give you a frame of reference to measure the impact of your efforts. And for this, three methods are possible:

The implementation of a Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) , which consists of modeling the total environmental cost linked to the production of your website, from the manufacture of the server to the consumption linked to each page load, passing by the emissions linked to the creation of the site itself. This is the best method in absolute terms, but it can be expensive, and often out of reach for a VSE / SME.
Include your site in a strategy to reduce your emissions : this is, in most cases, the best option. It requires that you have carried out your carbon footprint beforehand, and isolated the share of emissions linked to your website. You can then set a goal to reduce these emissions as part of a redesign, and ideally place it in the broader context of a NetZero strategy.
If you haven't realized your carbon footprint, compare yourself to your competitors , or to similar players! Select your top three competitors, average their emissions, and set your sights on doing better.
Whatever your method, your site's eco-design strategy begins and ends with measuring your emissions; setting a course is therefore an essential preliminary before you start creating your website.


Model your future impacts: make the right trade-offs during conception and design
The UX/UI design of your website is the step that will, in most cases, have the greatest impact on the environmental performance of your website: what increases the energy consumption of your website is before all the weight of your pages, and this weight is directly related to their length and content.

When designing your site, your main challenge will therefore be to track down the unnecessary: ​​videos, images, functionalities, etc. Eco-design is above all an invitation to focus on the essentials.

Apply best practices during development: reference tools to know
A key stage in the creation of a site, development is also the best documented phase with regard to eco-design. Your bible on the subject: the 115 rules of eco-design, published by the GreenIT collective.

Caching, minification of resources, use of the HTTP2 protocol… So many good practices that we will not (re)detail in this article, since they are perfectly documented by GreenIT.

Good to know

To assess the environmental performance of your site, the Ecoindex site is your reference tool. You can also use the GreenIT-Analysis plugin for a more systematic approach.

Content optimization, the great forgotten part of eco-design
Blind spot of eco-design, content management is nevertheless a powerful lever to optimize the environmental performance of your website, our 3 tips for optimized management of your media:

Resize your images and videos to their target size before embedding them on your site: an image 3 times smaller can weigh almost 10 times less.
Optimize your media with appropriate software: Handbrake for videos, Tinypng or ImageOptim for images, ILovePDF for your documents... There is bound to be a (free) tool to help you reduce the weight of your media!
Train your collaborators, and in particular those who will contribute to the feeding of your website, you can also impose weight limits by type of document on your website to avoid imports of unnecessarily large files.


Accommodation: some keys to reading a strategic choice
Last, but not least, the hosting of your website must be given special attention. While it is currently difficult from our point of view to appoint a champion of responsible hosting in all circumstances, it is a question of keeping in mind a few simple rules when choosing your hosting provider:

Always opt for a host so the data centers are close to the end user: the distance traveled by the data has an impact
Take an interest in the recycling and reconditioning policy of your host: remember, at scale, it is the equipment that is expensive for the environment!
Ask your host about its commitments, and make it a criterion of choice in the same way as security, for example.
Do not oversize your server in principle, take a storage margin that remains realistic in relation to your needs.

And the measure in all this? How to declare the environmental performance of your website
Have you eco-designed your website? Measure it and declare this impact to inform your users, but beware of greenwashing! A few tips for keeping your posture as neutral as possible:

Explain your measurement methodology in complete transparency (tools, procedures, limits, etc.)
Express the impacts from a relative point of view (your efforts) and absolute (the actual emissions related to the consultation of your site).
Decorate the declaration itself from your eco-design efforts: dedicate a page dedicated solely to your declaration, and another to your approach and your commitments
Use open-source tools and methods to perform your measurement, for example the GreenIT-Analysis plugin.