Sustainable Web Design in NYC: 2022 Trends

The 21st century is a period of immense and quick tech progress. It comes with much innovation in the digital market, changing how web design and development have been approached for decades. However, the cost of this progress is high, with the pace of global warming and climate change also accelerating. As a result, no business can stay aside from the sustainability concerns. Eco-friendliness and responsible energy consumption have become the hallmarks of web design in NYC, like in any other part of the world. So, here we talk about ensuring eco-friendliness and carbon emissions reduction through web design.
What Can Web Design in NYC Do to Become More Sustainable?
Companies working in the field of web design in NYC should focus on the following metrics to assess their carbon footprint and take measures for its reduction.
#1 Web Page Weight
The rule of thumb is to use kilowatt-hours per gigabyte (kWh/GB) to identify the web resource’s energy efficiency. This parameter indicates how much data is transferred within a specific period of time when the website or app is in active use. The more data is transferred, the more efficient a resource is considered.
The efficiency indicator depends on the web page’s weight. It will work faster and consume less energy if it’s lightweight and doesn’t contain any redundant, heavy elements. Desktop apps weigh up to 2 MB on average, while mobile apps are 1.77 MB on average. However, the situation has changed since 2016, with fancy graphics, animation, and images increasing the pages’ weight by 36-100%.
#2 Carbon Intensity
The website’s carbon intensity is a parameter showing how many grams of CO2 every kilowatt-hour of electricity consumption produces (gCO2/kWh). Using renewable energy sources results in less than 10 Co2/kWh, while fossil fuel burning is much more carbon-intensive, reaching 400 gCo2/kWh in some cases.
But how can a company working with web design in NYC reduce its carbon intensity? Is it the measure they can affect? The answer is yes, and the solution is to choose a data center with low carbon intensity. You can easily choose a data center relying on renewable energy and locate the website on a local server to ensure that its operations are sustainable.
You Can Make a Difference
As you can see, agencies providing web design in NYC have real, effective tools to contribute to curbing climate change. Concerns about sustainability should be embedded in all business processes in the 2020s. So, apply the metrics we’ve just discussed to get a tangible idea of how your business and its products affect the environment. Knowing this will pave the path for improvements.