Did you know that your website choices could be hurting the planet more than you think? It’s a bit of a shock, but if the internet were a country, it would be the sixth biggest polluter in the world.
That’s right – those design decisions you’re making actually have a real environmental impact.
The numbers tell a pretty alarming story. The internet gobbles up about 416.2 TWh of electricity annually—that’s more than the entire UK uses. And yet, only 5% of websites are powered by renewable energy.
If current trends continue, the IT sector could be responsible for a whopping 14% of the world’s carbon emissions by 2040. But don’t worry – it’s not all doom and gloom. Sustainable web design gives us practical ways to shrink our websites’ environmental footprints.
So, ready to make your website a bit kinder to our planet? Let’s get started.
Step 1: Measure Your Website’s Carbon Footprint
Before you start making any eco-friendly tweaks to your web design layout, you need to know what you’re working with. Think of it like checking your car’s fuel efficiency before trying to improve it – you need that starting point to measure your progress against.
This first step gives you clear numbers to work with and helps pinpoint exactly which bits of your site are the biggest environmental culprits.
Use tools like Website Carbon Calculator or Ecograder
We’ve found several brilliant tools that make measuring your website’s carbon emissions surprisingly easy:
Website Carbon Calculator keeps things simple – just pop in your URL and it spits out a report showing your site’s carbon footprint per page view. It compares your results with other tested websites so you can see where you stand in the bigger picture. Plus, it gives you an annual CO2 estimate based on your monthly traffic.
Ecograder digs a bit deeper by looking at four key areas:
- Findability (how easily users can find what they’re after)
- Design efficiency (how your layout affects energy use)
- Performance optimisation (speed and resource consumption)
- Hosting environment (what kind of energy powers your servers)
There are other handy tools worth checking out too. Beacon scans your site and gives you detailed reports with specific improvement suggestions, while GreenFrame actually simulates user journeys to measure carbon emissions along different paths through your website.
Understand data transfer and energy usage
Your website’s carbon footprint comes down to two main things: the energy used during data transfer and how clean (or dirty) that energy is.
Every time someone visits your site, data has to travel from servers to their device. Bigger files need more energy to transfer and process. The number of HTTP requests your pages make also directly impacts energy use – each one needs server power and network resources.
To put this in perspective: a webpage using 1MB of data transfer produces about 0.2g of CO2 per view. For a site with 10,000 monthly visits, that adds up to 24kg of CO2 yearly – the same as driving a car for roughly 61 miles.
Where your servers are located matters too. Data centres running on renewable energy have much smaller carbon footprints than those using fossil fuels. That’s why identical websites can have completely different environmental impacts depending on where their servers sit.
Identify high-impact pages
Once you’ve got a handle on your overall website carbon footprint, it’s time to zero in on the pages that are your biggest offenders:
Traffic analysis: Pages getting the most visitors naturally have the largest cumulative impact. Your homepage usually tops this list, making it your number one target for optimisation.
Page weight assessment: Use tools like Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to spot your heaviest pages. These typically contain large media files, too much JavaScript, or inefficient code.
User journey mapping: Track common paths through your site and work out the combined carbon impact of complete user journeys rather than just looking at individual pages.
For the biggest impact, create a priority list of pages to optimise based on both traffic volume and page weight.
Step 2: Choose a Green Hosting Provider
Now you’ve measured your website’s carbon footprint, it’s time to make one of the biggest impacts on your site’s sustainability – choosing a green hosting provider.
This is honestly one of those changes that can make a massive difference with relatively little effort on your part. Did you know that data centres housing web servers gobble up about 1-2% of the world’s total electricity? That’s a huge amount of power just to keep our websites running.
What makes a host eco-friendly
Not all “green” hosts are created equal. The truly eco-friendly ones use several strategies to keep their environmental impact low:
Renewable energy sourcing: The real green hosts power their data centres using renewable energy like wind, solar, or hydroelectric. Some clever ones generate their own renewable energy, while others buy it from certified green suppliers.
Carbon offsetting: Many hosting companies use what’s called Verified Emission Reductions (VERs) or Carbon Offset Certificates. These help balance out their carbon emissions by investing in environmental projects – things like planting trees.
Energy-efficient infrastructure: The hosts who really care invest in Energy Star-rated equipment and keep their Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) ratings low. This means they’re using energy primarily for actual computing rather than wasting it on cooling or other functions.
Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs): Sometimes called Green tags, these certificates show that 1 megawatt-hour of electricity has been generated from renewable sources and fed back into the grid.
Sustainability culture: The best green hosts don’t just stop at their data centres – they extend their green practices throughout their entire operation. This includes encouraging staff to use sustainable transport and setting up proper recycling programmes.
How to check if your host uses renewable energy
You can’t just take a host’s word that they’re “green” – you need to do a bit of digging:
Green Web Check tool: This is a brilliant free resource from The Green Web Foundation. Just pop in your website URL and it instantly tells you if your site runs on green energy. The tool checks their Green Web Dataset, which gets millions of queries every day.
Review certifications: Any legitimate green host will proudly display verifiable certifications – things like RECs, Carbon Offset Certificates, or membership in programmes like EPA’s Green Power Partnership.
Ask direct questions: When you’re looking at potential hosting providers, don’t be shy – ask them specifically about:
- Which renewable energy sources actually power their data centres
- What specific sustainability certifications they hold
- What energy efficiency measures they’ve put in place
- Any evidence they can provide to back up their green claims
Examine sustainability reports: The hosts who are genuinely committed to being green will publish transparent reports that detail their environmental impact and initiatives.
Using the Green Web Foundation directory
The Green Web Foundation keeps a really useful directory of verified green hosting providers – it’s a goldmine when you’re trying to pick an eco-friendly host:
Free impartial verification: Their directory only lists hosting providers who’ve gone through their verification process and shown evidence they meet specific sustainability criteria.
Country and service filtering: You can search for green hosting options by both where they’re located and what specific hosting services you need. This makes it much easier to find providers that fit your requirements.
Public evidence access: When providers make their evidence publicly available, the directory links to it directly. This helps you understand exactly why an organisation can claim to be green.
Regulatory compliance: With new laws like Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive and California’s Climate Corporate Data Accountability Act, providers in this directory are often already ahead of regulatory requirements for sustainability disclosure.
Choosing a green host makes a huge difference to your website’s carbon footprint.
Step 3: Design a Low-Impact Web Layout
The visual elements of your website have a massive impact on its carbon footprint. Once you’ve got your green hosting sorted, the next big opportunity to cut energy use is optimising your site’s visual design. Creating an eco-friendly design isn’t rocket science – it just needs some smart thinking about colours, fonts, and interactive bits.
Use darker backgrounds and minimal colour palettes
Here’s something most people don’t realise – on OLED screens, a white screen uses about six times more energy than a black one! With more and more devices using OLED displays, darker colour schemes can really slash power consumption.
Instead of blinding white backgrounds, why not try:
- Dark grey backgrounds instead of pure black (much easier on the eyes)
- Muted tones like deep blues, olive greens, or charcoal
- Off-white alternatives if you need lighter designs
The benefits go beyond just saving energy. Darker palettes can reduce eye strain, especially for night-time browsers.
Limit custom fonts and animations
Did you know a single font weight can add a hefty 200KB to your webpage? That’s a lot of unnecessary data transfer. Here’s what we recommend:
Use system fonts (the ones already installed on most devices) whenever possible. This cuts out those extra HTTP requests and downloads. If your brand absolutely needs custom fonts, limit weights and variants, and host them on your own server rather than pulling them from external providers.
As for animations – use them sparingly. They’re hungry for CPU and GPU power, gobbling up RAM and requiring longer rendering times. Only use animations when they truly add value.
Step 4: Optimise Media and Code for Efficiency
Let’s talk about those heavy bits of your website – media files and bloated code. These are typically the biggest culprits when it comes to your site’s carbon footprint. The good news? Optimising these elements not only makes your site more eco-friendly but also gives your visitors a much faster, smoother experience.
Compress images and convert to WebP or AVIF
When it comes to sustainable website design, image optimisation is your quickest win. Those traditional formats like JPEG and PNG? They’re creating unnecessarily large files that waste both bandwidth and energy.
Modern image formats offer some pretty impressive improvements:
- WebP delivers 25-34% smaller file sizes than JPEG with the same visual quality
- AVIF is even better—50% smaller than JPEG and 20-30% smaller than WebP
WebP works across all major browsers now, though AVIF is currently limited to Chrome, Firefox, and Opera. To make sure everyone can see your images, use the HTML picture element to provide fallback options for older browsers.
Before you upload any image to your site, run it through a compression tool like TinyPNG. This uses lossless compression, which means your file size shrinks without making the image look worse. Then convert those optimised images to these more efficient formats.
Lazy-load videos and avoid autoplay
Videos are absolute monsters when it comes to page weight. They’re typically the heaviest elements you’ll have on any page. That’s why lazy loading—where videos only load when scrolled into view—can make such a massive difference to your initial page weight.
It’s actually really simple to implement. Just add the attribute loading=”lazy” to your video elements to delay loading until needed. For even more savings, add preload=”none” in your video tag, which stops the video file downloading until someone actually clicks play.
And also, avoid autoplay. Autoplaying videos eat up tons of bandwidth whether users want to watch them or not. Not only does this waste energy, but it can also annoy your visitors and make them leave your site.
For videos you absolutely must include, consider using the WebM format. It uses modern compression tech to achieve big file-size savings while keeping the quality high.
Minify CSS, JavaScript, and HTML
Code bloat is a silent contributor to your website’s carbon footprint. Minification—removing unnecessary characters like whitespace, comments, and line breaks from your code—makes your files smaller without changing how they work.
It might seem like a minor tweak, but minification actually delivers real benefits:
- Smaller files mean less data transfer and faster loading
- Lower energy consumption through more efficient processing
- Better visitor experience with fewer people abandoning your site
Most modern development workflows have automatic minification built in. If yours doesn’t, don’t worry – there are loads of online services and CMS plugins that can handle this job with minimal effort.
Step 5: Improve User Experience and Reduce Waste
Here’s something you might not have thought about – user experience and sustainability are actually closely linked. Websites that are easy to use don’t just make visitors happy, they also cut down on wasted energy from unnecessary page loads and server requests.
Streamline navigation and reduce clicks
Every time a user clicks on your website, it burns through server resources and energy. It’s a bit like leaving lights on in rooms you’re not using – wasteful and completely avoidable. When users can find what they need quickly, pages spend less time loading and processing. These smoother user journeys directly translate to lower carbon emissions.
We recommend these simple improvements:
- Create intuitive menus with clear, descriptive labels
- Add visible calls-to-action that show exactly what the next step is
- Keep your navigation consistent across your entire site
The numbers confirm – 61.5% of users will abandon a site if the navigation is poor. Each of these abandoned sessions isn’t just a missed opportunity for your business – it’s also wasted energy.
Audit and remove outdated content
Did you know that outdated content silently eats up server resources while giving almost nothing back? It’s true – every single page on your website generates carbon emissions, so keeping only useful content isn’t just good practice, it’s the responsible thing to do for the planet.
Before you start deleting pages, check if they:
- Still get meaningful traffic
- Contain information that’s accurate and up-to-date
- Serve a clear purpose for your visitors
For any pages you decide to remove, don’t just leave users at a dead end – set up 301 redirects to relevant current content. This preserves your SEO value while keeping the user experience smooth. If you have pages with historical value that you don’t want to delete completely, try using “noindex” tags to stop search engines crawling them unnecessarily.
Align SEO with user intent to reduce bounce rate
When you match your content to what users are actually searching for, you create a win-win for both sustainability and business. Search engines deliver your pages to exactly the right audience, bounce rates go down, and users find what they need efficiently.
This perfect matching of content to intent saves energy by cutting down on the computing power needed for additional searches. When users find what they need on the first attempt, there’s less digital waste and lower carbon emissions.
We’d suggest focusing on the following for web design layout:
- Creating content that directly answers users’ search queries
- Using clear, descriptive meta titles that accurately reflect what’s on the page
- Building internal linking that enhances the natural user journey
It’s worth remembering that good SEO and sustainability actually want the same things – efficient, valuable digital experiences that don’t waste resources. It’s a perfect partnership!
Creating a Greener Digital Future: Start with Web Design Layout
Sustainable web design offers a brilliant opportunity to shrink your digital carbon footprint while making your site better for users. The steps we’ve walked through in this guide give you a practical approach to eco-friendly web development that’s good for both your visitors and our planet.
Your journey to a greener website starts with measurement. Understanding your current carbon impact gives you that essential baseline to track your improvements. Then, switching to renewable energy hosting makes a massive difference to the emissions from your digital presence.
Ready for your greener digital future? Contact us today here at We Get Digital and we’ll guide you on the needed steps to take in order to have a better and greener digital future.
