What Is Sustainable Website Design — Our How-To Guide

Did you know that all our digital activities — from sending an email to sharing a video or updating our website — have an environmental impact (known as “digital pollution”)? 

Unless you’re planning on going off-grid and relying on carrier pigeons for all your marketing output, it’s very tricky to avoid adding to that pollution.

However, there’s loads we can do to reduce our negative impact, and sustainable web design is a great place to start.

Keep reading for our in-depth, easy-to-follow guide on what sustainable website design is, why it matters, and some simple tips on how to make your site more eco-friendly.

What Is Sustainable Web Design?

Sustainable web design is the process of designing and building websites that keep environmental impacts to a bare minimum. This can be achieved by implementing practices such as reducing energy consumption and carbon emissions, choosing green hosting providers, and making the user experience as efficient as possible.

The Sustainable Web Manifesto has six key principles for digital sustainability. You can sign up to read the policies in more detail, but if you’re more of a TLDR person, these are the positive actions we all should be taking to make the web a greener place:

• Clean– the services we provide and the services we use will be powered by renewable energy
• Efficient – the products and services we provide will use the least amount of energy and material resources possible
• Open – the products and services we provide will be accessible, allow for the open exchange of information, and allow users to control their data
• Honest– the products and services we provide will not mislead or exploit users in their design or content
• Regenerative – the products and services we provide will support an economy that nourishes people and planet
• Resilient – the products and services we provide will function in the times and places where people need them most

Why Does Having A Sustainable Website Matter?

In real-world places, like houses and offices, it’s relatively easy to picture how we can be more environmentally friendly: recycle, reuse, turn things off… You know the drill. 

But when there’s no physical stuff to sort out, and the lights are technically always on, what does eco-friendly web design actually mean?

For websites, a lot of it comes down to energy, in particular…

• The devices we use to browse the Internet
• The server facilities and data centres that store websites, process search queries, and hold the web’s content

The energy consumption of our collective online activity is obviously MASSIVE. In fact, if the Internet were a country, it would be the 13th-largest consumer of electricity, between Mexico and Brazil (at the time of writing). Environmental agencies also estimate that it would be the world’s fourth-largest polluter.

That pollution doesn’t just come from power consumption but from the environmental impact of all the other resources needed to keep us online. Digital communications, such as emails, DMs, or Slack messages, also use a large amount of water because they all need to go through data centres.

Data centres produce a lot of heat — think about how hot a laptop can get when you’re doing an intensive task — and they’re cooled using our old friend H20. To give you a visual of just how much water is needed to keep us online, a Microsoft sustainability report revealed that its water consumption jumped by 34% between 2021 and 2022 to around the volume of 2,500 Olympic swimming pools  😲

How To Find Out How Eco-Friendly Your Website Design Is

If you knew you wanted to get better with money, you’d probably start by taking stock of what you already had. 

Even if you’re scared that you’re quite deep into your overdraft, the only way to find out is by checking your bank balance. Similarly, to make your website more eco-friendly, you’ll need to know where you’re starting from. These two carbon calculators are ideal for getting an idea of how eco-friendly your website is:

• Website Carbon estimates your website’s digital carbon footprint and gives general guidance on how to improve it.
• Eco Grader gives a much more granular breakdown of factors affecting your website’s environmental impact and carbon emissions. 

Don’t be downhearted if your score is bad — website carbon calculators aren’t meant to be a biodegradable stick to beat yourself with. The fact that you’re even checking is a great first step! Keep a note of where you’re starting from so you can track your score increasing as you make sustainability-focused updates to your site.

How To Tackle Eco-Friendly Web Design Yourself

There are lots of small but impactful changes you can implement to make your website more energy-efficient and reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. 

In addition to contributing to broader sustainability goals, many of these changes are also good for your website’s overall user experience.

Power Your Website With Renewable Energy Sources

Your website needs energy to run — especially to power where your website data is stored (or ‘hosted’). As we mentioned above, these data centres use a lot of power, so choosing a green hosting company to look after your website is a good green strategy. According to Ecograder, choosing a web host that powers its servers with renewable energy can reduce your digital product or service’s environmental impact by an estimated 15%.

Some website builders, like WordPress, allow you to choose where your website is hosted, which means you can pick an eco-friendly hosting company. We’ve switched to Krystal for our hosting, which is 100% renewably powered from the sun, wind and sea. They also plant a tree each month for every active client on their books, and are aiming to plant or protect one billion trees by 2030.

Going green pays! If you’d like to try Krystal for yourweb hosting, you can use our referral code GOODEGG to get £15 off. Just enter the code at checkout.

All-in-one DIY website builders like Wix and Squarespace handle hosting for you, so you have one less thing to think about when creating a new website for your business. However, not every website builder prioritises sustainability, so it’s worth having a snoop through their Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) reporting to find out how green they are before you commit to their platform.

Sustainability Optimisations To Make Your Web Design Practices More Eco-Friendly

When your car is very full, it uses more fuel. Similarly, if your website is very resource-heavy (lots of large images and videos, big plugins, etc.), it needs more energy to host it and also more energy for Internet users to view it. 

A big website will also have a big load time, and you’ll know from personal experience that no one likes slow loading times. They have such a negative impact on website users, in fact, that 40% would abandon a website that takes more than three seconds to load (Kissmetrics).

Here are a few ways you can lower the resource usage of your site:

• Optimise your images to reduce their file sizes
• Pick the right image formats for the job
• Don’t autoplay videos
• Enable lazy loading of images
• Use content delivery networks (CDNs) 
• Limit how many custom fonts you use

More Eco-Friendly Practices For Online Businesses

Even if you’re not in a position to make any changes to your website, here are a few other ideas for sustainable web practices that you can incorporate into the day-to-day of your business.

Use Links Instead Of Attachments

We’ve talked about ways your website is using energy, but there’s a great way that your website can help you save energy, too.

Looking at digital carbon emissions, an email without attachments produces 2-3 grams of CO2 emissions (depending on whether you’re viewing it on a computer or a phone), while an email with attachments produces 50g.

If you replace an attachment with a link to your website, that will massively reduce the carbon footprint of the email. You could do this by making a page on your website to replace a PDF brochure, or by having an online client area for people to log in and see information about your business.

Slim Down Your Email Inbox

On a similar note, reducing the number of emails you receive will have a positive impact on your carbon footprint. 

Reading and storing emails both have a carbon cost — it’s not huge, but it can soon mount up, and it’s a straightforward issue to tackle. Plus, it has the added benefit of making your inbox feel less overwhelming, which’ll improve your own digital experience (bonus!).

An easy place to start is by unsubscribing from unwanted newsletters. Next time one lands in your inbox, here are a few signs that you should unsubscribe…

• You delete it straight away without opening it
• You don’t remember signing up for the mailing list
• It’s not adding any value to your life
• You’ve not opened any of the last three emails from this newsletter

You could also search for the word “unsubscribe” in your inbox and see what comes up.

And if you know you’re never going to refer to an email again, delete it. It uses power to host it and adds unnecessarily to your digital footprint.

If you’re looking for a newsletter you’ll definitely want to read, sign up for The Highly Emotional Business Owner. We’re obviously biased, but our readers think it’s pretty great, too!

Be Choosy About Using AI

TLDR: Don’t ask ChatGPT for something you could easily Google, and hiring a real-life photographer or copywriter to create things for you is a greener choice with fewer environmental consequences.

Artificial intelligence will have a significant negative impact on energy consumption. And, as AI is integrated even further into daily life, a BBC News report suggests that its energy consumption could be comparable to that of the Netherlands by 2027.

According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), ChatGPT uses almost 10 times as much energy as a Google search. And if you’re creating something using generative AI, like an image, the energy use is even higher. According to the excellently named study ‘Power Hungry Processing: Watts Driving the Cost of AI Deployment?’, generating one image with AI uses as much energy as fully charging a mobile phone. 

As we’ve discussed in our article about AI and copywriting, artificial intelligence is a complicated subject with a whole range of ethical considerations and questions about social responsibility to take into account. We know there are many valuable use cases for it, so this isn’t us telling you not to use it, but in terms of sustainability, maybe use it sparingly.

Web Sustainability Made Easy

The digital landscape doesn’t have to be an energy-hungry wasteland. If you’re keen to implement a sustainability strategy for your digital presence, there are lots of straightforward changes that you can make to aid in sustainability efforts. 

Being environmentally friendly can look like using a green energy supplier, adopting good content management practices, and prioritising energy efficiency in your online activities. And the bonus is that lots of elements of sustainable website design also deliver better web performance and an optimal user experience, so it’s a win-win.

Get Our Free Green Website Design Training

If you’re running a business and want to improve the sustainability performance of your site, we’ve put together free, non-judgy training about sustainable website design. 

In it, we talk about:

• Sustainable practices that will have a positive impact on the environmental footprint of your website
• A comparison of which website builders and hosting platforms are best (and worst) for the environment, and how to switch to more sustainable hosting
• What type of content is the least sustainable 
• Why responsive design is good for the environment
• Free tools and digital products that will help you reduce your carbon footprint, without having to build a whole new website

Need More Help Making Your Website Eco-Friendly?

And if all of that feels a bit much, Good Egg can help! Making business websites more eco-friendly is our love language, and we have a few packages that do exactly that:

💻 Squarespace Website Packages (if you need a new website)– a shiny new website complete with SEO, original copy, and all our eco-friendly web design knowledge

📅Focused Website Days (if you already have a website) – book a full, uninterrupted day of our time to get your website’s sustainability up to scratch before you log off for the day