According to an article in the latest edition of the Tech publication Wired, many modern websites are bad for the climate.

It has been calculated that the total amount of CO2 emitted by an average website annually: it’s 2,112 kg.

Among the features contributing to the problem are “garish animations” and “auto play video”.

Online carbon calculator Website Carbon says that the more complex the website the more energy is needed for it to load and “the average web page weighs in at around 2MB, compared with less than 500KB back in 2010”.

For many businesses it is questionable whether their websites need all these complicated and energy-hungry features.

And if you want to be “green” business reducing emissions can be as simple as limiting the number of images that feature on each web page.

The simpler the website, with pages limited to essential information, the quicker it is to load, and it may be that website visitors, your potential customers will appreciate a simple, nicely designed website that gives them the information they want as quickly and easily as possible.