How eco-friendly is your news website? This tool lets you know

What is it?

A website that calculates your website's carbon footprint.

Cost: Free

How is it of use?

Simply paste your website URL into the search bar and the Website Carbon Calculator will work out an approximate carbon rating on a scale between A+ and F. The Global average is E.

For example, Reach plc owned manchestereveningnews.co.uk scores D, dirtier than 61 per cent of global web pages. We scored a C, cleaner than 51 per cent of global web pages.

The methodology uses five data points: data transfer over the wire, energy intensity of web data, energy source used by the data centre, carbon intensity of electricity and website traffic.

Simply put, news websites that are more data intensive (because of an abundance of ads, tracking and cookies) will use up more energy. Annual page views also add to the CO2 emissions.

How to go green

If you want to reduce your website's carboon footprint, the tool recommends looking into a green web hosting provider and/or sustainable web development.

For example, Baekdal.com, run by media anaylst Thomas Baekdal, scores A+, 96 per cent cleaner than global web pages. He uses green web provider Kualo, and a renewable energy firewall from Cloudfare, as part of a strict anti-bot system. NB: this score is after instructing the firewall to allow Website Carbon Calculator to access the site. Individual articles might score lower as well owing to larger sized images and assets.

"Back in 2022, I decided that my company needed to be 100 per cent renewable. Now, as a digital-only business, this is already fairly simple because I don't have any production. Also, I don't do any traveling like I used to, so I didn't have to think about planes, trains, or cars. That made it much simpler," Bakedal explained via email.

"However, I had four big problems: electricity (which is in my home, but I measure my electricity use separately for all office use using smart plugs), my web server, external impact, and my heating."

As for electricity, he pays a premium for renewable energy. Cloudfare also caches the site closer to where people live, reducing energy transfer.

"Next are the external sources, meaning the electricity used not by me but by my readers in their homes or offices when they visit my site. There is very little I can do about that, but what I have done is hyper-optimise my site. This means that it loads in 0.3 seconds (very quick) and contains no external scripts (except when you pay for a subscription)."

A visit to the Manchester Evening News front page, he explains, requires your browser to load 29.3 MB of data. His, by comparison, is 2.01 MB and basic articles are 0.6 MB. Heating is the final challenge to solve, which is something he will explore in the coming years.

This article was updated on 23 October by Jacob Granger with new information from Baekdal.com

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