WebsiteCarbon offers a free website carbon calculator which you can use to calculate carbon footprint of website to see impact of website on planet. Calculating the carbon footprint of a website is the same as calculating the carbon footprint of an electric car where an electric carbon doesn’t emit CO2 like an ICE car but lots of electricity planets do. The same goes for the website. You might be thinking of how a website can impact the planet. Well, to make a website works all around the globe requires data centers, transmission networks, and devices and all of those consume electricity. So, websites do have an indirect impact on the planet. As per “WebsiteCarbon”, an average website produces 1.3 grams of CO2 per page view. And, for a website with 10,000 monthly page views, that’s 156 kg CO2 per year. That’s lots of carbon emission for a website.
This website carbon calculator helps you measure the carbon emission of any website. It does the calculation based on average energy consumption per GB across the network. It uses the following five key pieces of data to get a good estimation:
- Data transfer over the wire
- Energy intensity of web data
- Energy source used by the data center
- Carbon intensity of electricity
- Website traffic
Also read: Interactive World Forest Map to Track Deforestation, Climate, Biodiversity
How to Calculate Carbon Footprint of Website?
Website Carbon gives you a rough idea of the energy consumption and thus carbon emission of a website. Currently, it only tests the homepage of a website with the hope of more advanced internal page testing in the later releases. This calculator ranks the website in its ranking based on how energy efficient the websites are. You can test any website for CO2 emission but to be get listed in the ranking table, a website must satisfy the following guidelines:
- Can be accessed by the public through a standard web browser
- Do not require login
- Allow search engines
- Contain unique content aimed at human visitors (excluding holding pages, error pages, etc.)
- Useless (this is highly subjective)
- Are free from illegal or explicit content
You can read more on that in detail here.
To calculate the carbon footprint of a website, you just have to enter the URL of the website to this calculator. Depending on the website, it takes a few seconds to a minute and tells you how energy efficient that particular website is compared to other ranked websites in the ranking table. It also tells you how much CO2 is produced on every visit to that website and weather website using sustainable energy or not.
This website carbon footprint calculator also gives you over a year of CO2 emission stats of the website you test. It tells you how much CO2 equivalent that side emits in a year along with the number of trees requires to absorb that.
Wrap Up
This website carbon calculator is really helpful to get insight into the impact of a website on the planet. Having such insightful information about the website can motivate the makers to reduce the carbon footprint of their website, fight climate change, and shift to sustainable energy resources.
