Cutting websites cuts energy, carbon footprints

Here’s a smart energy idea: review all the websites an organization or company might have, and eliminate or consolidate sites to make information easier to find, site navigation more streamlined and — here’s the kicker — web hosting a lot more energy efficient and a lot less costly.

How much potential savings are we talking? Well, the US Department of Energy (DOE) alone estimates that paring down its web presence for minimum duplication and maximum efficiency could save $10 million a year.

It’s part of a new initiative, the Campaign to Cut Waste, announced this week by President Barack Obama. The campaign includes examining IT spending to see where unnecessary or outdated expenses could be reduced or eliminated. Many large businesses could probably benefit, both financially and in terms of their energy/carbon footprints, by launching similar campaigns.

The US government’s web presence, for example, is likely consuming way more energy in terms of computing costs than it should. The White House estimates there are 2,000 top-level websites for the federal government, with maybe as many as 24,000 sub-sites or micro-sites below them. The Energy Department alone has some 86 sites and hundreds more sub-sites.

As Cammie Croft, senior advisor and director of new media and citizen engagement at the DOE notes in a blog post, “As digital communications becomes even more central to delivering information and services to the public, the Energy Department will need to make new investments in this area. The process we are undertaking now will put those efforts on a much better footing — rationalizing our approach, making it more strategic and avoiding costly redundancies and inefficiencies.”