What does it mean for a website to be ‘green'?

The internet uses energy too. Rather startling amounts, in fact, as it creates roughly the same amount of carbon emissions as global jet flight. Massive data farms, constant video streaming, big data, code bloat, all of these are energy hogs and need feeding.

Sustainable

By building sites that load fast, that don’t require endless plug-ins to download and that are clear about their objective we can lighten the carbon load on the net. And to make the projects further sustainable, we can host the sites on servers powered by the wind and the sun.

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Why make websites as fast as possible?

SEO Friendly

Users like fast websites and therefore so does Google. As more and more searches are performed on mobiles making speed even more important - to both us humans and to Google’s algorithms. So by making a website that is green we are also making a website that is SEO Friendly.

There are a number of methods to speed up websites: stripping out unnecessary code, optimising images and video, reducing http requests - and even by removing the need for a database. Each case will take a slightly different approach, but the principles are the same.

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I’m an Old Coder

Why this, now?

I run a business and was frustrated with the SEO results we were getting. The more I looked into it the more I saw how important speed was, and how clean coding could influence that. As I dug further I began to discover the hidden environmental impact of our internet use, and began to see how speeding up a website could make it greener, and make it greener would speed it up - hence “GreenSpeed”

Originally an architect, I started coding in 1999, mainly experimental contemporary art sites for Italian galleries and museums. In 2005 I started running my own business and stopped coding. Now I’m back, to try and make the internet greener one website at a time.