Since late 2021 we’ve been exploring the concept of green websites, experimenting with ways we can make our site leaner and reduce its carbon impact. It’s been a fascinating journey, and as an agency we’ve learnt a lot about the overall carbon impact of websites and the Internet, and about the challenges of making environmentally friendly websites that also support the commercial needs of a business. 

While a site can always be made less carbon intensive there is the simple fact that many businesses rely on their websites to generate leads or sell their products and services. This means that a site has to (in many cases) be a slave to two masters when trying to be green: on the one hand it has to make changes to reduce its carbon footprint, and on the other it has to fulfil its business function. And as is often the case when serving two masters, the different needs can clash. 

In the case of Low Tech Magazine, they’ve gone all in on an environmentally friendly website. With its minimalist design, static build, dithered greyscale images, and the fact that it is self-hosted and powered by a solar generator (meaning it sometimes goes offline when the heavens decide not to play ball) this is a site that has decided sustainability is its North Star. As we might expect from such a brand. 

But not all brands can be as committed. However, this doesn’t mean that your website has to be dirty. Here are some things we’ve learnt that all brands can do to build the foundations of a green website. 

Headless websites can have less impact on the environment

There is increasing conversation around headless websites these days, and for good reason. They can make the build of a website simpler, and make marketers’ lives easier by allowing them to easily manage cross-channel content, and deliver consistent digital experiences across multiple platforms. 

Headless sites also come with an added benefit that is good for the environment: they are substantially faster. Due to how a headless system handles content loading and the fact that the code is generally lighter, page performance is almost always massively improved. This has a knock-on effect for carbon output as cleaner, faster pages use less power to serve. 

So switching to headless has both commercial and environmental benefits. Maybe now is the time to consider the switch to a headless website? 

Selecting a green web host

One huge component in the overall carbon impact of a website is the hosting. For sites to be served around the world with 99.99% uptime (keep adding the 9s if you want, your host probably likes to add a few more in their marketing material) requires huge power-hungry data centres. 

Not only are reams of servers guzzling up power round the clock, they also have to be kept cool constantly which uses a lot of power. Then there’s all the usual drain on power including lighting and so on. With everything going 24/7 that is a large amount of energy consumption. 

Lots of hosts use standard grid electricity, but there is a growing trend of green website hosting, with dedicated green web hosts that run off 100% renewable energy. Switching to one of these sustainable hosts can make a huge leap towards you having a more environmentally friendly website. 

You can find a list of green web hosts at the Green Web Foundation. One thing to be mindful of is that not all hosts claiming to be green actually use 100% renewables, with some instead doing carbon offsets. Offsetting isn’t the same thing as being a green host powered by renewables. The host is still running off standard grid electricity and all that implies, it just means they are investing in projects that they hope offset the carbon they produce. Organisations like Greenpeace have some strong views on carbon offsetting so it is worth thinking carefully about the host you choose. 

UX is the heart of sustainable web design

What is UX’s role in green websites? Great UX gets to the very heart of what the users of your site want and need, and helps to create a site that helps them satisfy their wants and needs in as efficient and satisfying a way as possible. This is at the core of sustainable web design. 

By building a site around your users you’ll make their journeys through the site faster and more effective, reducing their time on the site and therefore the amount of data transferred (as well as minimising the drain on their device which is one of the hidden and unknowable parts of the eco-friendly website equation). 

So if you want a sustainable website, don’t cut corners on the most essential part of any website project: user experience. Everytime a person gets lost on your site due to poor navigation, or is confronted with image rich carousels that loop constantly, autoplaying video, or intrusive animations, more and more data is transferred around, more power is used, more carbon dioxide is produced…and your user still hasn’t achieved what they set out to do. 

You might be tempted to think that the solutions for building environmentally friendly websites are all technological, but in fact what emerges from user research and UX can have a big impact. Sustainable web design is as much about your users as it is your business.  

Of course this doesn’t mean that green websites can’t look great. Which leads onto the next point…

Make images leaner (and be careful with video)

We’re visual creatures, and images help convey meaning as well as provide nice aesthetics. So having a site devoid of images is likely to only be a reality for very niche sites indeed. There’s no problem with having images (or video) the important point for sustainable web design is how you handle them. 

The first part is to reduce the number of images used across the site. While imagery helps keep users engaged and can be a simple way to deliver information, does your blog post really need 5 different images? Does your product page need 6 pack shots? Again, it’s not about getting rid of all images, but making careful decisions about what your users really need. 

Then for the images you do use, using modern formats like SVG instead of JPEG, GIFs, and so on will help reduce file sizes and speed up loading. Using compression software to make the files as small as possible also helps. 

With video, it’s a balancing act of deciding whether a video is needed or not. In some instances you will need a video to do a specific job: we know that product videos are useful for customers on ecommerce sites and can help them decide to buy. But there are definitely cases where video is a (carbon intensive) luxury that probably doesn’t add much to the user experience. Especially those looping ‘mood reels’ that are popular on homepages (we were guilty of that in the past). One thing to definitely avoid: autoplaying video. Let the user decide what to watch – it’s better for them and for the environment. 

You can see how we’ve tackled the use of images and video on our own site and the improvements made in a blog post by our Marketing Manager, Jessica Powell. [LINK: https://theorganicagency.com/insight/reduce-video-and-images/#body-content]

Good SEO is a crucial component for a green website

This might seem an odd one, but as our Senior SEO Consultant Lee Macklin has pointed out in depth here good SEO has a critical role to play in creating green websites. 

Why?

Put simply, important aspects of your website that have an impact on your Core Web Vitals and other metrics also impact your search performance. 

So if you adopt a ‘good SEO’ mindset you’ll naturally be thinking about things like page load speeds, knowing full well that the slower your page is (even in terms of fractions of a second) the worse its performance will be, the worse its user experience will be, and that this will impact your search performance. And for ecommerce sites it could even mean the difference between a conversion or not. So keeping tabs on the technical and on-page SEO aspects of your site, with careful auditing, and implementing fixes, will speed up your site and reduce the carbon impact. On an individual page level the gains are small, but when multiplied across a site and for all the visits to it the savings can be impressive. 

The never ending journey to environmentally friendly websites  

These are just a few of the core foundational elements that brands can delve into and begin the process of improving the carbon footprint of their sites. Like everything in the world of digital it should be approached with an iterative mindset, because the path to a green website isn’t straight and simple. Expect twists and turns, two steps forward, one step back, and shifting goalposts as you find the balance between a site that is better for the environment but can still help you deliver on your commercial ambitions. 

The first step? Try putting some of your webpages through our website Carbon Emissions Tool to get the lay of the land. And drop us a line to see if we can make your journey to a more eco-friendly site a little easier.