Sustainable Web Development with Green IT

As a web developer, the Internet and its usage immediately come to mind. After all, the contribution to CO2 emissions through Internet usage is not negligible: Depending on the estimate, it ranges between 1.8% to 3.9% of total global emissions—placing it ahead of the entire global air traffic sector—and that was before COVID! [1]. For those who already find this alarming, this figure is expected to continue rising. It is, after all, assumed that digitalization and digitality will continue to progress. This underscores the need for sustainable web development and green digital transformation.

Digital Sustainability vs. Non-Digital

Of course, the Internet is a great thing, and not using it would feel like going back to the Stone Age—and would render me unemployed. Digital self-denial is therefore unfortunately not an attractive solution to the problem. And not a sensible one either! Because, essentially, digitalization—when done right—is already a step in the right direction toward digital sustainability.

Let’s take the comparison between a traditional postal letter and an email: A letter generates on average an estimated 20 g of CO2. An email, on the other hand, only produces 10 g [2]. That sounds great at first—emissions are reduced by 50%. But considering the inflationary quantity of emails being sent, it quickly becomes clear that the balance is not as rosy as it first appears. Due to the speed of exchange possible via email, the volume of transmissions increases.

The Software Energy Consumption Problem Is Not New

This is also true for our use of available bandwidth. If you consider the information content of each megabyte transmitted, it has developed almost inversely to bandwidth: the actual utility of the data is getting smaller, while bandwidth continues to grow. Economist William Stanley Jevons already noted in the mid-19th century that more efficient use of a resource leads to increased overall use of that resource, not the reduction one might expect [3]. At the time, the issue was coal. Jevons assumed that wider and more efficient use of the resource would reduce demand. As we know, the opposite occurred. The same applies to the resource “Internet” today.

Moreover, Swiss computer scientist Niklaus Wirth noted 25 years ago that software becomes memory-hungry—and thus energy-hungry—faster than hardware improves [4]. So, increasing computing capacity and faster hardware doesn’t save energy: quite the opposite. We are consuming more and more energy. This points to the importance of reducing software energy consumption and embracing carbon-neutral tech.

Green Hosting for a Smaller Digital Carbon Footprint

The question I ask myself as a web developer is: What can we do in our professional environment? After all, we are the ones providing energy-efficient websites and services. This means we are fundamentally responsible for ensuring that the systems we design and develop use the available resources as efficiently as possible and are as durable as possible. Only then can we speak of truly eco-friendly web design and low-carbon web design.On one side, there are the data centers of hosting providers. Every time a webpage is called up, a server delivers the corresponding data and consumes electricity. Every single server request results in increased power consumption in the data center. On the other side are the end devices displaying the requested websites and also consuming electricity—whether it’s a PC or mobile device, they all need power. Even if we disregard the energy needed to produce all this equipment, it still adds up. Additionally, the content must be transmitted from the data center through the actual network infrastructure to the end device, requiring further capacity. Here, green web hosting plays a significant role in reducing the carbon footprint of websites.

We can observe that the energy transition is slowly gaining momentum and that some major internet corporations are voluntarily promoting the move toward fewer emissions: Google, for example, aims to offset all CO2 emissions caused by the Internet since its founding [5]. And Amazon also claims it wants to be climate-neutral by 2040 [6]. But even if no data center is powered by fossil energy one day, it is still not sustainable to consume more energy than necessary. Even if a server delivering a website runs on solar power, the energy it uses remains precious and a resource worth protecting. These steps mark a shift toward carbon-neutral tech and sustainable web development.

Green IT: A Step Toward Climate-Friendly Websites

This is where we, as web developers, come in: What actions can we take to make the web a more climate-friendly place through eco-friendly web design and green IT practices? One effective example is optimizing assets, such as images, which can unnecessarily bloat a website. By using responsive images, we can deliver images that precisely match the resolution needs based on the viewport size. This simple technique ensures that no images are loaded that are larger than a mobile device screen can display.

But this is just one of many actions we can take to rein in our websites’ energy consumption and build sustainable UX/UI. For those wanting to get an overview of the CO2 emissions caused by their own website, the website carbon calculator is a useful tool. And for anyone like me who sees the need for action, you can look forward to our blog post series, where we will explore various aspects of web development through the lens of digital sustainability. We will examine problem areas and energy hogs and present solutions to address and avoid them. As a Drupal developer, I will always keep an eye on Drupal—but what we share can easily be transferred and applied to other systems.

This series will cover the following topics:

• Backend optimization
• Frontend optimization
• Sustainable UX and UI
• Green web hosting
• Sustainable project management

I wish you—and myself—a rewarding journey toward greener and more CO2-neutral, climate-friendly websites and low-carbon web design.