With our Website Carbon Monitor, we aim to help businesses get an idea of their website’s net carbon footprint and use the results to move towards a more sustainable future. But you can also use the Carbon Calculator to peek at our work and see the carbon footprint of a page at any time. What did we consider when designing our calculator and why? Let’s see! 

Thanks to the digital transformation, websites have become increasingly important in recent years, whether you’re shopping or doing life admin online, so it’s also important to pay attention to their size. From images and video files to HTML code and Javascript, there are many elements that contribute to the size of a website and, at the same time, its carbon footprint. To determine the total carbon footprint of a website, we need to know the net (per download) carbon footprint  of each sub-page, as well as the gross carbon footprint that’s taking traffic into consideration as well. How can we start measuring the net carbon footprint of our website?

In line with the international methodology used to measure websites, we have created our Carbon Calculator to help anyone measure the net carbon footprint of a site. But we have made the results more precise by setting up our own criteria.

What do we do differently? We take these factors into account:

•  returning visitors result in a smaller carbon footprint than new visitors due to caching, so, contrary to international methodology, we made the return rate adjustable and didn’t use an average value,
• which country visitors typically come from, as the Electricity Map shows that the carbon footprint of electricity used in Hungary ranged between 230-290 gCO₂eq/kWh in the last month, while the global average used by competitors is 442 gCO₂eq/kWh—so other tools can often overestimate the carbon footprint of a Hungarian website, but we can calculate more accurately for our home country and any other country as well.

Have we piqued your interest? If you’d like to try our Carbon Calculator, you can see the net carbon footprint of a page of your choice here. But what about my gross carbon footprint, and how can you automatically see trends over time? If you want a fuller understanding, you can also check out our Website Carbon Monitor here, which looks at the impact of traffic in addition to the net carbon footprint for a complete and detailed picture!