I went on a journey to learn more about what it would take for me to have an eco-friendly website. This was the process and the cost.

What I Did To Make My Website Sustainable & What It Cost:

What makes an eco-friendly website? It’s important to know that “every online action, including every interaction with [a] website results in electricity being used” (Yoast, 2023).

Side-by-side comparison of the before and after making MacailaBritton.com environmentally friendly!

How Is Energy Used With Websites?

• Whenever someone visits a website, their browser needs to make an HTTP request to the server asking for information.
• Servers then, need to respond to this request and return the necessary information.
• Whenever this happens, a server spends a small amount of energy to complete the request.
• Browsers need the power to process data and present the page to the visitor.
• The heavier and more complex your website is, the more energy is required to send and process data.

Source: Yoast.

1. Audit Of My Website & It’s Impact – Free

Before I made any adjustments to my website, I wanted to understand what my website’s impact is. How much emissions does it produce annually? And, compared to other websites, is this typical? When researching, I found a free tool called the Website Carbon Calculator, that indexed my website and helped pull key information for me to understand how to optimize.

My website’s initial sustainability score on a scale from A+ to F, was an F. I was shocked! I had a feeling my website would be producing a lot of emissions. After all, I’ve been blogging for ten years, But, I wasn’t expecting to be the worst on the grading scale.

The rest of this blog post outlines the solutions I implemented to make my website sustainable.

2. Transferred My Website To Green Hosting – $45.35

When I began this project it was because I wanted to switch to green hosting. This was the only sustainable solution I was familiar with when it came to lowering my digital impact and emissions. This change was even outlined in the audit (photo above) prompting me to switch to green hosting as a way to decrease my website emissions by 9%.

This article is a great overview of what green hosting is and why it’s a more sustainable solution. The Shift Project also has statistics and more information on the internet’s environmental impact.

Green Hosting Platform Used

MacailaBritton.com is now an eco-friendly website hosted by GreenGeeks.

How I Chose My Green Hosting Platform

Ultimately, I chose GreenGeeks because it had the best offerings for what I needed and wanted.

1. Nearby Data Center

Green Geeks has a data center in Chicago. I live in the Chicago suburbs and this data center was the closest to me compared to other companies.

2. Recognized By The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)

Since 2009, Green Geeks has been recognized by the United States EPA. Between that and Green Geeks publishing its certificate for REC (renewable energy credits).

3. Validity

I felt comfortable with Green Geeks’ validity because I could follow the company’s claims. Many other hosting companies did not back up their claims, which was alarming. I had a few questions for Green Geeks about what some of their sustainability policies meant. When I reached out to their team for more information, they responded in less than 24 hours and provided more in-depth answers. The team could have easily copied and pasted what was on the website, but they took the time to help me understand and provided more resources for their environmental claims.

4. Positive Reviews

My friend and colleague, Molly uses this company and recommended it. This gave me peace of mind because she knows the back-end capabilities that I need from both a blogging as a creative and technical perspective.

The video below is also a great review of the platform with visuals of the hosting back end. The only thing I disagree with is the reviewer’s comment about the pricing. It’s typical for all hosting to offer a higher annual pricing model after the first year. Compared to competitors — both green hosting and fossil fuel hosted, this is still amongst the industry’s better deals. Green Geeks offers discounts for nonprofits and for accounts that remain in good standing during the first year and the years following.

5. Reliable Technical Support

I’m not a techie. I know the necessities for a career in communications, marketing, and public relations. Plus, the basics to support myself blogging. I’m not an IT wiz. I didn’t study computer science and at this time, I don’t have plans to. That being said, I needed to find a green hosting platform that had team members who specialized in this area and who were reliable and accessible should I have questions during the setup.

6. Affordable Or Included Website Transfer Service

Green Geeks set up and transferred my website for me. Other companies did not offer this. And, f they did it was for $500+. That was not within my budget and there were many conditions for that service that I felt uncomfortable paying and agreeing to. One company was unable to provide a flat rate or even a range. And, they said they might not be able to do it entirely. When I asked what “entirely” meant, they could not provide a scope of work or confirm if they would be able to transfer all of my pages, posts, or comments.

However, when I messaged Green Geeks, they provided in writing that they could 100% transfer my website. They disclosed that I would need to do some editing for the layout because I was transferring from WordPress. com and not WordPress.org or another self-hosted website and this would not be a 100% match transfer. In all honesty, I was a bit scared of this. But, seeing as I was already going to be redoing my layout, I authorized the transfer and purchased the hosting package.

Despite redoing my layout, the amount of edits I needed to make after the transfer was minimal and took me about an hour. It was mainly changing the colors, fonts, and hiding the site total on my menu bar, and replacing it with the logo. Other changes were fixing a few blocks that had too much space or not enough. All of the content was intact and did not need editing.

The most important part of this was that the Green Geeks team updated me every step of the way and clearly communicated what I needed to do. They provided tutorials in written form and provided screenshots.

I ran into issues but it was not to do with their services. Since I was provided a grant for this project from The Nature Museum, I needed to coordinate with their team and comply with their grant terms and conditions. The issues were around logging in and ensuring all team members from the Museum had access, invoices/ receipts, and that their card wasn’t saved on file.

7. Affordability

The last factor I considered when selecting a green hosting company, was the price. I had a $250 grant and my goal was to find a host that met my other major points of interest (outlined above) plus took on the cost for one year of green hosting. Green Geeks was the only one that provided everything. Plus, the renewal costs are affordable for my budget moving forward.

Green Hosting Cost Breakdown

Since I already owned my domain (MacailaBritton.com), I needed to transfer that to the host versus purchasing the domain and hosting together. In total, my package was $45.35 for 12 months of green hosting and support.

• Green Geeks was running a discount, so this cost me $35.40 for one year of hosting.
• There was an additional $9.95 ID Protect fee (extra security) that I chose to add on.

3. Apply Website Design/ Structural Changes – $10.99

I thought this section would be a lot harder and more costly. The only charge I had was for a flash drive. I used this to create my own backup of how the website was when I transferred, just in case I want to revert any changes or re-upload content I would be deleting. Though, Green Geeks does store backups of its hosted websites, regularly.

Delete Old Posts

Over the past 10 years, my website has drastically grown — in followers/ readers and its content. I hadn’t at any point over the last decade gone through my content. After my website was transferred, I downloaded a backup zip file of my website and all posts/ photos, etc. I saved it to a flash drive, which cost $10.99. Then, I deleted all of the posts, pages, and media I felt no longer supported the direction my website was growing.

Deleted:

• 33 Comments + 49 spam comments

Delete Old & Unused Pages

I made a few updates to my site design. As I was doing this, I went through the pages and deleted unused or outdated ones. Coupling these together made the process feel less overwhelming and easier to decide if I wanted to update existing content or build something new. The only things I kept were the contact, about, and privacy policy pages. Otherwise, I deleted the others.

Deleted:

• 4 Pages
• 6 Pre-installed hosting templates

Kept Videos Off The Homepage & Other Pages

This excludes embedded videos from other social platforms.

Optimize Images

The hosting platform recommended a few image optimization plugins. The purpose of these types of plugins is to ensure the images are a smaller yet high-quality size, so it takes less energy/ resources to load. Not only does this make loading time faster for readers and users, but it uses less energy. Imagify is the plugin I chose. It has a free package, which I’m currently using.

This was very easy to use. All I did was install the plugin and follow the directions. There was a progress bar showing me how many images it had optimized and how many remained. Now, anytime I upload images, it automatically optimizes them.

4. Implement SEO Strategy & Optimization – $89.10

I was shocked to learn that SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is a part of the strategy for users to have an eco-friendly website. When I was researching why, I learned that in addition to SEO being great for driving traffic to websites, it’s also useful to help reduce energy consumption

How Does SEO Decrease A Website’s Carbon Emissions?

SEO optimization helps users “find the information they want quickly and easily” (Whole Grain Digital, 2019). Successfully using “results in people spending less time browsing the web looking for information and visiting less pages that don’t meet their needs.” In simple terms, SEO helps people find information faster, which means less energy is used. And, less energy used is better for the planet.

I’m not an SEO specialist. My understanding and experience are proficient, but not at an expert level. As part of my grant budget, I included the Yoast SEO Premium package. This plugin integrates into my website and gives me tips and points out what I need to do to optimize my content and pages for strong SEO. It will rank each post and page too, so I know what needs to be improved.

The Total Cost For My Eco-Friendly Website Was $145.44

Overall, I feel like this is a fair price. Yes, my green hosting package will increase in 12 months, but that new total before any discounts will be $143.40. For the price of one cup of coffee per month from a trendy café, I have a website that is powered by renewable energy. This, to me, is worth the price.

What’s Next?

My eco-friendly website journey doesn’t stop here! This was step one. Please see below for the next, upcoming milestones!

1. Continue Optimizing My Eco-Friendly Website

I’m going to be going through all of my previously published blog posts to edit the SEO so it fits my new SEO strategy. 35.2% of my current posts are optimized. To continue ranking well and using the least amount of energy, I want to be 100% SEO optimized.

2. Publish An Impact Report

I published an impact page in 2022. I want to update this with more information, statistics, and the next set of eco-friendly website goals.