How does it feel to know you are reading this article from one of a few green travel websites around? Did you know that if the Internet was a country, it would be the fourth largest polluter? A single website visit emits 1.76g of Carbon Dioxide on average due to the intense processing power required to load and deliver a page. With over 1.13 billion websites competing for attention and web pages full of data, it’s no wonder the Internet guzzles up energy like a thirsty monster.

Add a sluggish website to the equation, you not only frustrate visitors but also add to energy waste, exhaust your server, and increase electronic waste. For online marketplaces like Kenya Geographic, the stakes get even higher. Travellers have no space for a slow website. They want to search, buy and book their travel experience easier and quicker. They also love it when things are eco-friendly and sustainable.

Booking.com’s Sustainable Travel Report 2022 revealed that 81% of travellers consider sustainable travel important to them. Half of them cite recent news about climate as their main reason for making more sustainable travel choices. Considering that the majority of them fall under Gen Y and Z, they heavily rely on peer-reviewed online platforms to plan their travel. It goes without saying, their sustainable travel consciousness will naturally extend to how such booking platforms use energy. At Kenya Geographic, we have taken steps towards making our website one of the few green travel websites around. Here are three of the many things we are currently doing.

Green Hosting

Kenya Geographic runs on Google’s Premium Cloud infrastructure whose data centres match 100% of their consumption with renewable sources like wind and solar, ensuring optimal site speed, high levels of redundancy, and sustainability. Geographically distributed data centres bring our web pages closer to our users, enabling us to realise faster load times and lower energy consumption.

Optimised Web Resources

Using technologies like lazy loading, and image compression and adopting next-gen formats such as WebP, we have reduced website data without compromising its quality and consequently saving energy.

Multiple Caching Strategies

We have implemented three layers of caching that include static, full-page, and database query caching. The result is up to five times faster website loading. We additionally use proprietary Content Delivery Network (CDN) technology to reduce load times and increase availability. This significantly reduces energy use.

These efforts, enable us today to rank among the most green travel websites in Kenya currently. With a rating of 2.15g of Carbon Dioxide on average per visit, we are doing quite well. Truth be told, calculating a website’s carbon footprint is not an exact science yet. It involves various other factors outside our scope. Nevertheless, it presents a step in the right direction.