A new study by WebsiteToolTester has analysed over 200 popular website homepages, from social networking to fashion, to discover which are causing the most CO2 emissions and which are the most eco-friendly.
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Did you know that everything you do online from shopping to streaming your favourite programmes contributes to your carbon footprint? Brands are continuously promising to become carbon neutral to help make the world less polluted, but their websites that we visit daily are actually affecting the planet more than we realise, with each homepage hit emitting carbon into the environment.
So which websites are the most polluting and which are the most eco-friendly?
YouTube Has The Highest Carbon Footprint Yearly
Every day users around the world use Youtube to watch videos, explore new content and even upload for others to watch. Sadly, it is the worst website for producing CO2 emissions, just from its homepage alone.
With a whopping 360 billion yearly traffic to its site, it produces 702 billion grams of CO2 a year!
The search engine, Google, has 2.929 million people searching for answers to their questions a day. This makes them the second largest website producing the most CO2, emitting 267 billion grams a year.
Zoom has become a huge part of everyone's lives since the shift to working from home. Businesses, friends and family have used the website to communicate with each other while the pandemic hit.
With yearly traffic of 30 billion people, the site produces just over 114 billion grams of CO2 a year, from homepage visits.
Twitter Is The Worst Social Media Website For Producing CO2
Twitter is a popular social media app where users can share tweets with one another and interact with likes, retweets and comments.
The social media platform is the worst social media site for emitting CO2, it emits 58.7 billion grams of CO2 a year from its simple login page alone thanks to its yearly traffic of 70bn.
Microsoft Is The Biggest Tech Site Producing The Most Carbon
Microsoft develops, manufactures, licenses, supports, and sells computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services.
A household name, it has 13.4 billion visitors a year looking to buy software or consumer electronics like computers or tablets. It produces 27.2 billion grams of carbon a year just from homepage visits alone, which is more than other leading technology companies like Apple and Samsung.
The Most Eco-Friendly Websites
Social media app Instagram is the cleanest homepage in the study. Thanks to its simple login before you move to the active news feed, the site produces only 0.01 grams of carbon every time a user logs in to their account. This simple set up hugely differs from Instagram’s competitors. The Facebook login page releases 0.20 grams of carbon per login page visit, while Twitter users cause a whopping 0.84 grams every time they land on the homepage to login and tweet.
This gives us an insight into how the overall sites are set up, with Instagram clearly taking the lead for the environment.
How to clean up your site and make it more energy-efficient:
- Make your content load faster and make sure your user experience is optimised
- Think about the data your site needs to load. Does every visitor need to see everything, or can some of it be loaded up later?
- Think about the power supplier your servers use, can you switch to a greener one?
About WebsiteToolTester
WebsiteToolTester is a site builder comparison website where their aim is to help people create their own websites – without them having to write a single line of code. The site gives unbiased and honest reviews on the best website building tools available.
The post The Most Eco-Friendly And Carbon Producing Websites appeared first on ValueWalk.
