Even before the Town Council declared a Climate Emergency in March 2019, we were always looking for ways to cut our carbon footprint, but recently we discovered an unexpected way to make carbon savings; by optimising our websites www.bradfordonavontowncouncil.gov.uk and www.bradfordonavon.co.uk
“Tackling climate change is massively important so when the Town Council approached me to help reduce the carbon footprint of their websites I was very excited and eager to see what we could achieve.”
…said Tom Beavan, website manager for both of the Town Council’s sites.
“When you visit a website you don’t tend to think of it as something which leaves a carbon footprint, but a server somewhere needs to send the information from A to B and that requires energy. The more data it needs to send, the more energy is used.
By reducing the size of the images being used, advanced caching and removing unnecessary/unused code, we managed to decrease the carbon by around 80% on the Bradford on Avon Town Council website alone; that is a very satisfying feeling!”
Communications Manager for the Town Council, Lydia Booth, said:
“It’s fantastic to know that we’ve been able to reduce the carbon footprints of our websites so much and, as an added benefit, visitors to them should now benefit from increased page loading times and energy efficiency at their end.”
If you’d like to find out more about how your personal or business website might be able to reduce energy consumption, the following article by Wired is a good place to start: