Committed to sustainability
Nobody’s perfect. Neither are we. But we are doing our best to work towards a better world. A world where SEO is available for everyone and where we can make green choices while we’re at it. Read more about our commitment to sustainability.
Working towards a greener world
You probably know us from our green traffic lights in Yoast SEO. But our love for green runs even deeper. We love the world around us and want to do our part to preserve it.
That’s why we work hard to reduce our own carbon footprint and offer features in our products that help you create a greener website. We also have a cool initiative to contribute to trees being planted all over the world. Check out the video to find out how many trees have been planted so far! »
What are we doing to reduce our carbon footprint?
As the video above illustrates, we regularly donate to an organization that plants trees all over the world. And we’ve been able to plant loads of trees so far. Naturally, we want that number to continue growing but we also realize that it doesn’t stop there.
We’re committed to sustainability and there’s loads of other stuff we’re doing to reduce our company’s carbon footprint. You can read more about it right here:
Fewer cars on the road
Our colleagues work all over the world. So a lot of our meetings are already happening online. But even for people who live right around the corner from our offices, we have the option to work remotely. And for the people who do prefer coming to the office, we encourage them to take public transportation or hop on a bicycle instead of taking the car. That way we can reduce the amount of air pollution caused by cars on the road.
Recycling made easy
At our office, we make sure that everyone separates their waste and disposes of it in the right containers. We also bring old cartridges and devices like printers and old smartphones to a recycling point near our offices so that they (or parts of them) can be used again. Our colleagues are also allowed to bring in their personal devices to make sure they get recycled.
We don’t like wasting food
For the people working at the office, we like to provide lunch. But we definitely don’t want any of that food to go to waste. That’s why any excess food that’s left over is brought to the food bank, a charitable organization that hands out food to people who need it most. In addition, we’re mindful of what we buy and use organic products to prepare our lunches.
Sustainable resources
To work on our products, we can’t avoid using energy. But to keep our environmental impact low, we’ve installed solar panels on a few office buildings and use a sustainable heat pump. Two of our buildings are actually energy neutral. And for our colleagues that need to go somewhere with more than just a backpack, we have an electric Yoast car that everybody is free to use.
How can Yoast SEO reduce your site’s carbon footprint?
Your website might not be the first thing that pops into your head when you want to reduce your carbon footprint. But online traffic and the electricity it requires actually have quite an impact.
The Yoast SEO plugin comes with a few features to help you minimize both for your website. As an added bonus, a cleaner website can also benefit your SEO and the user experience of your site visitors!
Remove unnecessary URLs with the crawl settings
Search engines like Google use crawlers (online bots) to go through online pages. These crawlers ‘read’ all of your content to find out what your pages are about. But website builders like WordPress automatically create loads of pages that don’t need to be crawled at all. Pages that are just costing energy and getting in the way of your more relevant content. With the crawl settings in Yoast SEO, you can select which automatically generated URLs should be cleared. This helps search engines crawl your site more efficiently and reduces the strain on the environment.
Prevent thin content by redirecting attachment URLs
When you upload an image or other attachment to WordPress, your site automatically creates a dedicated page for that file as well. In most cases, those pages don’t look great, cause unnecessary online traffic and ‘thin content’ problems when you have lots of them. That’s definitely something you want to prevent. With Yoast SEO you can automatically redirect attachment page URLs to the actual image, limiting the number of excess pages on your site and with it the carbon footprint of your site.
Help search engines spend less electricity
Unfortunately, we can’t get the energy spent on your website completely down to zero. What we can do is help search engines spend less electricity on understanding your content.
In Yoast SEO we offer SEO data optimization. When you use this feature your site will immediately receive the speed benefits. This helps improve your site’s SEO and keep it in excellent shape! What’s even more, this optimized SEO data allows search engines to understand your website with more efficiency and therefore spend less effort and electricity. Read more about the indexables and how they work.
Clean up your website with our SEO workouts
Last but not least, we want to highlight our orphaned content workout. Yoast SEO Premium comes with a few actionable SEO workouts and this one shows all of your content that doesn’t have any links pointing towards it.
Why? Because it’s important to ask yourself if these pages are still relevant to your site. If the answer is yes, you can improve them right away. If not, it’s best to remove them and prevent unnecessary interactions on your website. Not only does this reduce the carbon footprint of your site, it prevents confusion for Google and site visitors.
Unlock these features in Yoast SEO Premium
Clean up your site and level up your SEO with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin for WordPress!
What else can you do?
We care about the world we live in and that’s why we’re committed to sustainability. We hope this page gave you some insight into what we’re doing to reduce our own carbon footprint. And what we’re doing to help reduce the environmental impact of other websites that use our products.
Want to know what else you can do? Check out our blog post on how to reduce the carbon footprint of your website.