Simple and Effective Ways to Reduce Carbon Footprint as a Developer

The American Marketing Association put out an interesting post a couple of years ago. They talked about the growing need for eco-friendly web design practices. If you are a web developer, then you should take the lessons in that article to heart.

The world around us is changing and it is common knowledge that climate change is our own doing. Everything that leads to CO2 emission possesses a potential threat to the environment, which is why people from all kinds of fields are partnering with experts to find an ample solution to reduce carbon emissions.

Carbon footprints are one of the major concerns, but thankfully for all of us, the technology of the modern world comes off as the savior as well. Certain measures can be taken to reduce carbon footprint so we can take a step forward towards a cleaner ecosystem. In case you are a coder or a developer who wants to contribute to the cause, you must be familiar with no-code development technologies, which are recently becoming more and more popular.

In case you want to contribute more to the cause of restoring the natural state of the environment, read this blog till the end to know about some simple ways that can help you to achieve what you want as a programmer while also looking out for the environment.

Effective ways to reduce carbon footprint as a developer

You might think that sustainability isn’t a big deal for Internet-based professions. After all, it seems that the Internet has a much smaller carbon footprint than most traditional marketing channels. Unfortunately, the carbon footprint is not negligible. Internet use accounts for 3.7% of all carbon emissions, so web developers need to help reduce it.

We have talked heavily about the need to implement green business practices. Here are some tips specifically for developers.

• Via measuring

Certain tools can help users to measure how eco-friendly your website is. Apart from that, users also get the option of measuring the energy impact so they can make good use of the following tips to come up with a counter plan to get rid of all the possible environmental issues at hand.

• By choosing renewable energy host providers

Although it may not seem like it, host providers and data centers use a lot of energy since there are tons of computers to process the data, which in turn, makes the room very warm. Keeping the air cool is a must if you want to tackle the problem of carbon footprint, especially for the systems that consume a lot of energy.

Picking an eco-friendly host can help you with the same.

• Via using dark mode

If your OS supports dark mode, or if you can switch the theme of the application to darker colors, then you should proceed forward with the same. Apart from helping with the environmental side of things, darker colors are better for the eyes and also consume less battery and energy in the case of both laptop and mobile devices.

• Turn off the camera

It is no secret that people have been forced to use virtual meeting platforms such as Google Meet, Zoom, etc. due to the whole COVID-19 situation, it has slowly started to become a part of our daily lives. Stats show that an hour of video calling or streaming via OTT platforms such as Netflix can lead to 150 to 1,000 grams of emission of carbon dioxide. Thankfully, turning the camera off can reduce this number by 96%.

• Via the optimization of fonts

It is common knowledge that optimizing the fonts of files can contribute significantly to the environmental cause and can reduce file sizes up to 97%.

ü The use of modern web fonts such as WOFF and WOFF2. Better compression methods are used by these two when compared to TTF, OFT, and SVG along with other formats.

ü You can preload required fonts to give the browser a better chance at getting the fonts right.

ü Sub-setting can also help in that way, only the characters that are required.

• Use CDN and servers that are near to the users

Once can reduce traffic on network telecoms by using servers and CDN’s that are nearer as that will considerably reduce the consumption of energy by their infra-structure

• With the use of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

All of the unnecessary weight of the file along with the code is removed by AMP to make sure that it loads faster on mobile devices which makes it possible to render a minimalist version of the web page in the first place.

• By the use of static web pages

It is often seen that servers use more energy, especially when they are somehow related to the server-side rendering process.

The need for a static generator is one of the main reasons why the no-code development is being taken into consideration so much as of late.

• Try to avoid the use of Google Search

Several stats have shown that Google Search emits a dangerous amount of CO2 whenever a user accesses a website on it. To fix this issue, behold Ecosia, which is an eco-friendly search engine that also offers privacy to the users.

These are some of the major ways that can help a developer to excel in the world of coding while also fulfilling their duties towards nature.