This story was originally published on Not Bad
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I grew up when the internet was just gaining popularity. I remember asking dad if I could use the dial-up connection for a bit—to get on to Wikipedia for a school assignment, play Habbo Hotel, or chat with friends on MSN Messenger.
This was back in the days when that meant you couldn't use your landline while browsing. Back when webpages would look something like this:
Or this(!!!!)
Websites back then were 300 kilobytes or less per page on average, compared to 2,200 KB per page for popular modern sites.
But hey, I'm not here to get all misty-eyed about the good ol' days or call for a return to Web 1.0, am I? Times have changed. What hasn't changed is how, in this unimaginably gigantic archive of modern life we call the web—with its billions of indexed pages, files, and cat videos—somewhere in it… there's us, leaving our mark.
Our presence online isn't just virtual. It's casting a very real, very physical shadow on our planet. A digital carbon footprint that silently grows heavier with every pointless email, every autoplay video, every LinkedIn growth hack. It's like that friend who keeps ordering shots at 2 AM—it just gets worse and worse. And honey, it's time we cut it off and sober up.
Doing what you can to build a better web
By default, we naturally associate doing business digitally (or online), let's say sending people digital receipts instead of printing physical ones, with keeping things "green". But here's the reality: the internet is responsible for about 3.7% of global emissions. Right up there with the aviation industry.
Every photo we post or video we stream. It all adds to the collective digital footprint we're leaving behind. Just think about how, globally, the average web page (including this post) generates approximately 0.8 grams of CO2 equivalent per pageview. So a site with 10,000 monthly views would produce roughly 100 kg of CO2e each year. That's like boiling a kettle a thousand times!
When we think of the destructive causes that contribute to climate change, sitting behind a desk sending emails all day probably isn't the first thing that comes to mind. But with the colossal number of data centres and the ever-increasing number of internet-connected devices, the digital world is now beginning to be harmful to the planet.
The silver lining is that technological growth also drives innovation, and there's a lot of potential for good change. The tech and ICT sectors are making strides, and we should all play a part in this transformation by taking matter (aka our internet footprint) into our own hands.
In September 2024, a UK survey revealed that 61% of businesses have taken action to reduce their carbon emissions. That’s good progress! Because yes, many are just doing their best to keep the lights on and pay the bills. I'm not here to shame them.
But—at the cost of sounding like a Tesco stan—I do believe that every little helps. And most of us can start with our websites.
Whether you built it yourself, rely on external people to maintain it for you, or once hired someone to set it up, there are ways to make websites more sustainable and lean. Some are surprisingly simple to implement! No, I'm not talking about throwing money at carbon offsets. They're plasters on a bullet wound.* We need surgery, and it starts with actually caring about the purpose behind our sites, how they're hosted, and how our customers use them. Just like you'd care, let's say, if you owned a small-town deli, about where your products came from.
How the Internet creates CO2
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It relies on physical servers in data centres around the world.
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These data centres are connected with undersea cables, switches, and routers that need energy (and, increasingly, water) to run.
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While more and more data centres are adopting renewable energy sources—IBM, for instance, reports that 74% of their data centres are powered by renewables—many still rely on local electricity grids powered by fossil fuels.
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Then there's the issue of how many of the centres house (cloud) storage that's up and running, using energy to store stuff people literally never access. A recent report from Ahrefs shows that 96.55% of all webpages in their database get zero traffic from Google, and 1.94% get between one and ten monthly visits.
Digital is like sugar: it's so sweet and irresistible, so easy to create, so easy to store, so easy to ignore. So cheap. So everywhere. Digital is the ultimate 'just do it' mantra. Think of all that useless content that organisations create. Why? Because that's what management wants. The senior marketing manager wants the bling stock images because they look cool. Marketers find these sugar-coated smiley faces irresistible. And stock images are so cheap now. Why not pump them everywhere? Who cares if they slow down the site and waste energy? Who cares if it takes longer to scroll and find things?
Okay, but why should I care?
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Cost efficiency: Implementing sustainable web practices goes hand in hand with achieving a faster, lighter website. Thus reducing hosting costs and improving user experience.
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SEO SEO SEO (damned SEO!): Unless you're a market leader in everything or a household name like Amazon—whose site we all know is just a tad bloated—Google considers your page speed a ranking factor. So it will favour faster, more efficient websites.
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Brand image: More and more consumers are choosing to spend their hard-earned cash with a business that cares about its environmental impact. Recent analysis shows that 84% of customers feel alienated by brands with poor eco-friendly practices, while 17% of European grocery shoppers plan to increase their purchases of environmentally friendly products.
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Simpler design tools: New, easi(er)-to-use design and carbon analysis tools are popping up like mushrooms after rain, making it easier for small businesses to build their sites with carbon consumption in mind. Even in the no- and low-code space (how I bring sites to life at Never Not Ready), we're getting close. And with the right strategy, no-code developers can too build sites that are mean AND lean.
Four steps to a greener website
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Consider page budgets: A page weight budget is like a meal plan for your website, but instead of calories, you're counting megabytes: the amount of data (fonts, media elements, and code) transferred when someone visits your page. Set a limit and stick to it—or have whoever is building your site agree to it. Wholegrain Digital actually has a solid guide on this.
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Check if your third parties run on renewable energy: This is probably the simplest step to take. Use the handy Are my third parties green? tool; it's a great starting point. If your site is not running on renewable energy, switching to a greener option is now easier than ever.
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Say goodbye to autoplay: Let people choose when to click the play button on your videos. And if you're certain you can't do without autoplay, think again. When visitors come to your site, they may not appreciate being greeted by video or audio content that starts playing without their permission. Plus, as Sepas Seraj of Pixeled Eggs reminds us, you're forcing people to download data (videos require significantly more data than photos), which they may not want to do. You’re assuming everyone has unlimited data plans and a fast connection!
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Optimise images for SEO: Doing so forces you, by design, to also optimise for performance, page weight (and accessibility, to some extent). Since I love a good nested list—and I'm a bit of an image optimisation nerd—here are 3 easy tips to make your images more SEO and performance-friendly.
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Reduce size: Way too many websites use pictures that are too big for how they're shown on the page. This slows down performance. To fix this, reduce the image size (by resolution and weight). I use Photoshop to do so, but you can also use a free, beginner-friendly tool like Squoosh.
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Consider dithering: It's a technique that reduces colours in an image by adding noise to simulate missing shades. Play around with Dither Me This to see it in action. Keep in mind that not all images should be dithered. As Nathaniel, who built the tool above, points out, e-commerce and photography sites, for example, need full colour. But for text-focused content like magazines? Dithered images could be perfect.
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Use the right image formats: Use WebP over PNGs and JPEGs. Unless the image is mostly composed of geometric shapes, in which case vector images (SVG) rule.
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The bottom line?
Assess your website.
Optimise it.
Make it work harder for you, not your server.
Web sustainability isn't as much about being "eco-friendly" as it is about doing what you can—within the constraints of your budget and skills—to maintain a more efficient, cost-effective, and future-proof presence on the internet. For small businesses, it's also an opportunity to save money and, fortunately, it matches with SEO best practices.
I want to be honest with you. I said it could be surprisingly easy to reduce your internet carbon footprint. And yes, the tips I wrote about here will help. But there's so much more you can do if you dig deeper. There's a lot of value, if you ask me, in learning about the tools that power your business and, through that, playing your part in building a better internet.
I'm talking about looking into things like your code, website builder and loading of resources. It's a lot, I know. But it matters. The good news is, there are tons of resources about web sustainability to help you navigate this journey. If you genuinely want to learn more about how to make your site more sustainable, I'd be happy to point you towards some fab resources or share my experience. Feel free to reach out or simply leave a comment to this on its original Substack post.
Footnote
* Why not choose carbon offsetting? It's not a conversation I'm honestly prepared to get deep into here but, in short, carbon offsetting is a nice idea—in theory. In practice, it's like trying to unburn toast. We can't undo the damage, so we should concentrate on not burning the toast in the first place.