How important is green website hosting for photographers?

Why do photographers need a green website?

Photographers need a website to share and promote their work. Fortunately, a truly green, eco-friendly website is also a fast website. People like fast websites—they spend more time on them because they don’t have to wait for content to load. There are many advantages of green website hosting for photographers—most importantly better experiences for viewers, less energy use, and lower CO2 consumption.

A green website is a fast website

Good design and easy navigation are of course paramount factors for any website. But the time and energy it takes to load – the impact your website has on our environment – are essential considerations too.

Wait—why do photographers need a website? Isn’t social media good enough?

Every once in a while I see photographers post that they don’t see the need for their own website. They may say social media is easier and doesn’t eat up any of their time and energy to maintain. They outsource curation of their work to some platform (that doesn’t care about them).

Or I see their work on social media and find their website, only to discover they haven’t updated it in eons, and it’s slow. Which says a lot about how they value their own work.

Any serious photographer needs their own website because:

Your own website gives you control over your presentation and brand

With your own website, you curate what images people see, in which order, how they’re presented. You control your visitors’ experience of your work. That’s essential to building your brand as a creator and vital to establishing your credibility as a professional and an artist.

When I visit a fast, well-designed photographer’s website, I stick around and dive in because it’s a pleasure to browse. And I’ve bailed on top-name photographers’ sites because they were so slow to show any pictures.

Social media controls you

Posting your photographs on social media helps spread the word about your work and yourself. But it puts you at the mercy of whatever algorithm is current on the platform. Recently (2023) Elon Musk’s vandalism of the Twitter algorithms has exposed how social media manipulates visibility at the whim of whoever controls the code. And the migration of photographers away from Instagram highlights how frustrating and self-defeating a toxic social media platform can feel.

You have only very limited options to control how social media exposes your images. Platforms like Behance, Mastodon, or Vero allow you to create a curated collection of the images you post, but you on “conversational” platforms like LinkedIn, Mastodon, and Vero you have no control over how your images display (framing, context, etc). And you may not even be able to prevent your images from being copied stolen if the platforms don’t have proper controls in place.

So no, social media is not your friend. And no, it’s not good enough. It’s more like a bad boss or a passive/aggressive narcissistic boyfriend/girlfriend.

You need your own website like you need your own room or home. Someplace where you can call the shots, relax, respect yourself and your work.

What is green website hosting?

Green website hosting means website hosting services that focus on minimising energy use while maximising sustainability. Green website hosting covers any hosting provider’s hardware and software choices, business practices, employee support, and climate-friendly initiatives in their community, among other things. A good example is 20i.com (which I use).

Why are green websites and green hosting important?

Green, eco-friendly websites and hosting are important because data processing consumes huge amounts of energy worldwide. Any reduction that any of us can make will help mitigate effects of climate change due to energy use.

Best practice code drives efficiency and speed

Best practice website coding reduces the amount of energy needed to run server farms. Those coding practices also help websites perform better.

Properly size your images

Smaller files (especially images) minimise the work and energy servers need to store, prepare, and serve web pages. You can safely use reduced image sizes and modern file formats like WEBP and AVIF. No one visiting your site will be able to see full size versions of your images because their monitor or device screen just isn’t that big. And since you’ve disabled the ability to right click on your website pages to prevent people from stealing your work, they won’t be able to save and print anyway. (You have disabled right click, yes?)

Good green website design lessens the work and energy that browsers and people’s devices need to do to display websites and allow people to interact with them.

All those considerations add up. Each individual aspect may consume a tiny amount of resources at any point in time. But compound them by billions of people using billions of devices, billions of times a day, and the overall effect is enormous.

How can you tell if your website is a green hosted site?

Check your hosting provider’s green website performance using a tool like the green web check from the Green Web Foundation. If it is, they congratulate you:

If your site is hosted green you even get a nifty logo you can add to your site:

My site is hosted by 20i, in case you’re curious.

How can you evaluate a website hosting provider’s green credentials?

Green website hosting involves multiple factors on the host provider’s side:

• Do they use renewable energy to power their servers and offices?
• Do they buy greener supplies and consumables?
• Do they recycle their waste?
• Do they encourage their people to reduce their carbon footprint, like by working from home and cycling or taking public transport to work?

OR

• Do they just buy “green credits” to offset their energy use, without doing much to prevent energy overuse in the first place?

I learned a lot about green website hosting after I started my search for an alternative managed WordPress hosting provider. Unfortunately, a lot of the big names tout their “green” credentials, but just buy their way out of doing anything concrete on their own.

For example, this article reveals that 4 of their top 9 “green” website hosts simply offset their energy use, without doing anything to reduce it or minimise the amount of energy their customers and website visitors use. (Looking at you HostGator, GreenGeeks, SiteGround, and iPage – shame on you!)

If you want to check a eco-friendly hosting provider’s green credentials, you could visit the Green-e® certification programme site hosted by the Center for Resource Solutions.

How can you tell if your site is a green website?

There are a number of “green website calculators” out there and they can give wildly different results without any detail about how they calculate. The greenpixie site does include a methodology page that gives some insight into their methods. I’m pretty happy with my results:

How can you tell if your website is a fast website?

Simple first step: clear your browser cache and go to your site in a “private” browser window. If your site’s home page opens in a second (literally), that’s good. If you have to wait more than 5 seconds, then there’s something that needs fixing. Then visit the other pages on your site. If they open quickly too – at least giving the viewer some indication that something’s happening, other than a spinner – great! If your other pages are sluggish, they need fixing.

You need to clear the browser cache and open in a private window to make sure you’re not seeing performance based on what your browser has saved locally, versus what it’s pulling from the servers.

Speed test results
will change a little
from time to time

Next step: search for “website speed test” and use a few of the website speed test sites to test both your home page and any other pages on your site. Most of those website speed test tools give detailed responses about what’s working well and what needs work. Be aware that your speed test results will change a little from time to time due to factors that are out of your control. Those include how your website’s hosting provider is performing, Internet traffic and latencies, etc.

What should you do if you think your website could be a faster eco-friendly website?

A lot of technical factors contribute to website speed, especially for eco-friendly websites. Things like:

• the number, size, and file type of images
• the efficiency your page code
• how many flashy special effects it uses
• whether fonts are served from your own server or from a third-party, eg Google fonts hosted by Google or hosted by you
• how many scripts are running to deliver your pages
• your green website hosting provider’s servers’ performance
• your own broadband/Wi-Fi speed

to highlight just a few.

It’s best to find an experienced website developer who understands all aspects involved in crafting a sustainable site that’s resilient and performs quickly.

Don’t just search the web for people who say they know what they’re doing. Instead, check out sites of other photographers. Note the ones that combine good design with fast performance, then ask them for a referral to their website developer.

A website developer is a critical business partner

Then get in touch with some of the developers and interview them. They should be able to explain in non-technical terms how to build and host a green website for photographers specifically. Ask them for client referrals and go visit those clients’ websites to see how they look and perform. A website developer is a critical business partner for any photographer. Interview them as if you’re hiring a personal assistant, and check references!

Personally, I created my website by myself because I have a technical background. I enjoy coding and learning about this stuff. Also, I was on a budget at the time that didn’t let me afford to hire anyone to do the work for me. That wasn’t a problem because I’m semi-retired and have some time on my hands. But I wouldn’t recommend that approach to anyone else.

Why not just use an automated website builder tool from a commercial provider like Wix, Squarespace, Weebly, whatever? Firstly, they’re unlikely to qualify as green or eco-friendly website hosting services. Furthermore, the code they generate from their automated website tools is mass-produced and almost certainly not the most efficient.

How about just buying a website theme and customising it yourself? I tried that and discovered that many website themes demo well, but aren’t developed correctly to make it easy to customise them. And they usually performed sluggishly for me.

If you really can’t afford to hire a sustainable website developer, at least look for a green managed website hosting provider who also provides tools to build your own website. You will of course have to do the heavy lifting yourself and bear in mind at least a couple of the prime suspects in poor performance: too-large images, and flashy special effects that add nothing to your value.

Everybody wins with a green website

Fast, eco-friendly, good design, and of course your glorious images all combine to deliver a great experience for your audience. And you enjoy a clear conscience.

Photographers can do well by doing good: going green is important for anyone who cares about our world and fellow life forms.

What do you think?

Do you have any questions or thoughts you want to share? Comment below!