What does it take to ensure your website is fully, truly carbon neutral?
In our green SEO blog series, we’ve already discussed some steps you can take to optimize your website and digital marketing efforts for green SEO, but that’s not necessarily net neutral. Let’s explore how you can calculate your website’s carbon footprint and what you can do to reduce it to zero.
Note that this post will focus on website carbon neutrality, not how to make your entire business green. If you’re interested in being totally carbon-neutral (like RicketyRoo is), you’ll need to consider other greenhouse gas emissions associated with your operations like travel, office energy usage, and company-provided meals.
Calculate Your Website’s Carbon Footprint
When I first started learning about this topic, I came across the statistic that an average webpage view results in 5 grams of CO₂, but that’s not universal. Before you start to think about offsets, you’ll need to calculate the carbon footprint of an average pageview on your site.
1. Use Website Carbon Calculator — This is my favorite calculator I’ve found so far. It estimates how many grams of CO₂ are produced when someone visits the page. Even more, it gives you a letter grade and compares you against the worldwide average.
Our Green SEO 101 blog post only generates 0.19g for each pageview; not bad!
2. Check Several Page Types and Average — Different pages on your site will have different carbon loads associated with them. Image-heavy product pages and feature-rich pages with a lot of code will “weigh” more than a text-only blog post. Run a few different page types, such as the homepage, blog posts, service pages, and location pages. If you’ve read our page-speed SEO guide, you’ll notice this is a similar process!
3. Calculate Entire Carbon Footprint —Now that you know the average carbon impact of a pageview on your site, simply multiply that by the number of pageviews you received in Google Analytics in a year. It’s easiest to look back on a full calendar year (i.e., I would look at all of 2023 as of writing in 2024).
Here’s an example calculation: a website with 30,000 pageviews in 2023 with an average carbon footprint of 1.4g/pageview would have a yearly website carbon footprint of 42 kg CO₂.
Caveat: this is all average calculation, not a certifiable way of measuring your website’s CO₂e (CO₂ equivalent).
Make Efforts to Reduce Footprint
Before moving on to paying for offsets, take whatever steps you can to reduce emissions associated with your website. Hopefully, you’ve already read our green SEO 101 guide, but here’s a quick summary of the top steps you can take:
- Move your site to green web hosting
- Optimize site speed
- Give your site an eco-friendly design
- Help users find the page they’re looking for faster (fewer pageviews per session = lower carbon footprint!)
Not only will this save you money when you go to pay for offsets next year, but it’ll start helping the planet as soon as you implement optimizations.
Pay for Offsets on the Year
Using the figure you calculated above, pay for offsets to match your CO₂e. Like I already mentioned, if you go with this figure, you’ll only be offsetting your website’s footprint, not your business’s. I recommend being totally carbon-neutral, but if all you want is a carbon-neutral website, this is your number!
RicketyRoo chose Terrapass for our carbon offset company because they support a diverse range of climate-positive projects. We recommend doing your own research and finding a carbon offset company that works best for your needs, budget, and business.
Now that you’ve offset the global warming impact associated with your website (and hopefully reduced that impact while you’re at it), you can rest assured that you’ve made your digital presence a greener place. Every step we can take towards a healthier planet is a step in the right direction!
Reducing your website’s carbon footprint may not seem like a huge milestone. What are a few kilograms of carbon here or there, right?
But imagine what we could accomplish together if more websites pursued carbon neutrality. A little carbon offset across a lot of websites adds up significantly, leading to a healthier planet—one website at a time.
