Digital sustainability.

A low carbon website is designed and built to use less energy when people visit it. Every image, video, or line of code requires data to travel across servers, networks, and devices – and that data transfer consumes electricity. The bigger and less efficient a site is, the higher its carbon footprint.

As mentioned above, the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance recommends a carbon load of less than 1g per page for a website, yet many pages exceed this.

Different organisations or tools to assess the carbon load of a website provide their own guide as to what ‘low-carbon’ is.

We recommend to organisations we work with to aim for less than 0.5g of carbon per page load in order to be considered a low-carbon website.

To measure a website’s carbon load or footprint, we baseline page weight, energy use through embodied emissions, and hosting, and also take into account the location of the server and user, then benchmark against recognised guidance. That gives us a clear before/after view once improvements are in. We can provide reporting on the figures to ensure we cover any metrics or points that may be required for CSR or carbon accounting needs.

No, having a sustainable website doesn’t mean it has to be bland or boring. Sustainable design is about thoughtful choices – efficient images, smart typography and lean interactions, not bland or stripped-back visuals.

Image and font optimisation, removing unused scripts, lazy-loading and sensible caching usually deliver immediate gains. We’ll prioritise by effort vs impact. You should see an instant result with website speed – it will be noticeable how much more quickly it loads, which reduces the exit rate from users.

Yes, we can offer green hosting options. We can move you to providers powered by clean or renewable energy and configure infrastructure for efficiency without compromising reliability. We also manage hosting for our clients, so that means you don’t need to make calls if you need support or anything happens.

Yes, we can quantify the carbon savings from a new site we design and build. We report baseline impact and the reduction achieved over time, alongside performance and UX improvements so the full picture is clear and precise. We can give you evidence to show how your website is carbon-efficient.

Sustainable websites can improve SEO and conversions. This is because faster, lighter pages often improve engagement and search performance. The benefit is practical as well as environmental.

There is no reason for a sustainable website to cost more, because many of the practices that reduce carbon emissions – like optimising code, compressing images, and simplifying hosting – also improve performance and efficiency. In fact, these choices can lower long-term costs by making the site faster to maintain, cheaper to host, and more resilient as technologies evolve.

For the build cost, it will come down to the rest of the brief. So focus on the objectives for the website, how it fits with your organisation’s goals, and what problems you need it to solve.