An attempt to quantify the carbon footprint of website traffic
The internet is often quoted as having a carbon footprint of 1.6bn tonnes CO2e per year.
That number includes everything that makes up the internet, including embodied and operational emissions of data centres, connectivity, storage, devices, monitoring and security solutions.
It includes all activities required to build, maintain and operate the internet at large, providing the services we depend on such as email, streaming, social media, websites, business services, and much more.
But our question was, what is the carbon footprint of website visits? How much of this 1.6bn tonnes is from web browsing?
The calculations below are our best guess at deriving this and are intended to drive discussion, so please feel free to get in touch with comments and/or improvements.
How much web traffic is there?
Looking at web traffic that results from search engines alone:
- Google serves around 2 trillion search results a year.
- Google serves about 82% of the global search traffic.
- Only 40-41% of searches result in click throughs
- The average number of page views per search is 4.78.
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Putting this together we get 4.6 trillion web page visits per year.
At the time of writing the average carbon footprint for the web pages we’ve tested ranges from 0.76g to 1.14g CO2e per page per visit.
Multiplying those numbers by the number of page visits per year we can determine an approximate range for the carbon footprint of website visits, globally.
Estimated carbon footprint of website traffic
to
million tonnes CO2e per year
Putting that into context, those numbers are equivalent to:
Website carbon footprints matter
With the global carbon footprint of website visits in the millions of tonnes of CO2e per year, its safe to say the carbon footprint of websites matter.
But beyond the sheer scale of the number, they matter in other ways too.
Since more than 80% of businesses have websites, websites are a carbon reduction opportunity that nearly every business on the planet can address and with Digital Carbon Online it has never been easier.
Digital Carbon Online automatically tracks the cumulative carbon emissions of websites over time, highlighting which pages are causing the most emissions and helping both inform and communicate improvement.
Also, since websites are often hosted by third parties, Digital Carbon Online makes website carbon emissions an easy Scope 3 quick win for many companies.
Why the range?
Our dual model assessment
In the world of sustainability and carbon footprinting, every data point comes with error, uncertainty or ambiguity and as such we thought it was misleading to present just a single number for a website carbon footprint.
With this in mind, Digital Carbon Online incorporates two assessment models, both following the Sustainable Web Design Methodology, that provide our users with a range for their website carbon footprints, rather than single (potentially misleading) value.
Start tracking your website carbon footprint for free
It’s really that easy, so don’t sit back and delay, do it today…
Start tracking your website carbon footprint with Digital Carbon Online today, prices start at £0.00. Find out more below.