Sustainable web design: Things to consider when designing a website with sustainability in mind
Gareth Wheeler, Senior Digital Designer at The MTM Agency, provides insight on sustainable web design, including why it’s important and how you can take steps towards improving your own site’s sustainability.
Sustainability and digital transformation
In the business landscape of 2025, sustainability is a driving force in decision-making across every industry. Many of the brands we work with at MTM have sustainability at the core of their mission. From supply chains, to service delivery, to digital infrastructure, businesses are under increasing pressure from customers, investors and regulators to take action on sustainability as part of their corporate social responsibility (CSR). Our blog on tailored decarbonisation communications discusses just this topic in more detail.
As digital transformation is touching even the most traditional of industries. There is an expectation that brands which are modernising their digital presence do so with sustainability in mind. Incorporating principles of green website design is fast becoming a recognised part of CSR, ensuring that digital innovation doesn’t come at the cost of the planet. Carbon-neutral websites go a step further than this. They are designed in an eco-friendly way, and then partner with a sustainability initiative to offset any remaining carbon emissions meaning the impact to the planet is net zero.
As these practices, which were just emerging trends just five years ago, have become mainstream, it presents a challenge for marketers and web teams but also a real opportunity. Aligning digital strategy with environmental goals has the potential to enhance brand reputation, boost the bottom line as well as helping the planet.
The carbon footprint of digital content
Chances are you’ve browsed social media, read an online blog, streamed music or downloaded a video today. Each of these actions emit a few grams of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere because of the energy used to power your devices, and more importantly, the energy used to power the vast data centres used to store and deliver the content we access everyday.
Data centres are the internet’s backbone. These labyrinths of circuit boards – tirelessly storing our collective digital lives – require huge, sophisticated cooling systems to keep the hardware functioning. This is just one of the ways data centres devour electricity, not to mention the hardware manufacturing impact, building construction and sheer square meterage of land involved.
In spite of the internet’s omnipresence in our lives, its true environmental impact has only recently been seriously researched. For example, one of the first explorations of this topic appeared in Moz’s Internet Health Report in 2018. It claimed that communications tech will emit more carbon than any country except China, India, and the U.S by 2025, so it’s safe to say that the topic will be growing in significance in the coming years as we all look to tackle our carbon footprint.
What is website sustainability?
As I just mentioned, just like all forms of digital activity, websites have an environmental impact. The way a website is created, stored and interacted with directly corresponds to the amount of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere as a result.
Website sustainability is the practice of understanding the emissions generated from the use of any website or digital application and designing them with the goal of minimising their impact on the planet.
Sustainable website design involves:
- Thoughtful, energy-efficient design choices
- Applying green UX/UI design principles
- Minimising the energy demands and data transfer involved in each user interaction
Luckily for web designers, the KPIs we usually aim for anyway (usability, functionality and performance) are all integral to low-carbon web design. Focusing on simplicity is not only good for the user, but it also means less resource consumption. It is the same with load speeds, which impact user interaction levels, bounce rates and conversion rates, with low load times also reducing a website’s carbon footprint.
The role of SEO in sustainable web design
It is not only web designers who will enjoy the benefits of eco-friendly web design, SEO specialists do too. SEO and sustainable web design are closely linked. Many of the practices that make a website more sustainable also contribute to stronger search performance. Key ranking factors for search engines also contribute positively to the site’s carbon footprint, as well as enhanced user engagement. These include:
- Load times
- Mobile performance
- Content efficiency
Optimising images, reducing unnecessary scripts, and designing with a mobile-first mindset not only make pages faster and more accessible but also reduce energy consumption during page loads. Clean navigation and well-structured content improve both crawlability for search engines and user satisfaction, two critical elements in achieving high search rankings while supporting web sustainability goals.
Who is leading the change?
Many brands are embracing sustainable web design and are seeing attributable success. Businesses that prioritise sustainability in design tend to have a stronger brand image, which can indirectly contribute to organic growth. Some examples include:
- Patagonia: The outdoor clothing retailer stands out by excelling in both product and digital sustainability through efficient coding, reduced data transfers, and renewable energy hosting. The site boasts an ‘A’ carbon rating according to the carbon calculator.
- Pela Case: The sustainability-focused phone case manufacturer powers its site with renewable energy and uses tools to measure and offset its carbon footprint. This eco-friendly digital strategy is evidently working with more than one million people switching to the brand, equating to 966,739 pounds of plastic that was prevented from entering the waste stream, according to the Pela website.
- WWF UK: The leading global environmental charity employs resource-efficient technologies and green hosting to minimise data transfer and CPU usage, thereby reducing its environmental impact. Given that the charity has reported consistent income from donations despite purse-string tightening during the cost of living crisis suggests that WWF UK has a loyal philanthropic audience. Their sustainable digital strategy is based on a solid understanding of said audience, their values, and what is important to them.
Why do I need a sustainable website?
There is one obvious benefit of a sustainable website. But what might be less obvious is the plethora of benefits for your marketing infrastructure. We’ve already spoken about SEO and UX, so here are some less obvious benefits:
1. Improved performance in global markets
A more sustainable website often means faster load times and reduced server demand, which can enhance your site’s accessibility in regions with slower internet speeds or less robust infrastructure. This means a sustainable website experience is often available to a broader audience in more locations, supporting global objectives for accessibility.
2. Provides an opportunity for ESG communications
With increased concerns over the state of our environment, ESG comms and being transparent about your business’ practices has become essential. Maintaining a sustainable website not only allows you to positively contribute towards the environment, it gives you an opportunity to talk about what you are doing, simultaneously staying on top of marketing trends.
3. It is cost-efficient
An optimised website generally uses less resources. Not only are you reducing your website’s energy consumption, you are also minimising the costs of large data-transfers; a simple, effective design often requires less maintenance or updates which saves your devs time; hosting becomes less resource intensive, reducing server load and subsequently energy bills. Overall, it allows you to cut some of the costs of running a large, expensive website and keeps your business happy and healthy.
How can I make my website more sustainable?
There are many ways to implement eco-friendly web design. The main question you should be asking is: how can we ensure that our website takes up the least amount of energy to build, use and store? Below I’ve compiled our top three tips to make an immediate impact:
1. Switch to green hosting
You can cut down significantly on your websites’ energy consumption by changing the way it is hosted. There are renewable energy-powered data centre options available which are significantly more sustainable than non-renewable powered alternatives. Switching to a local hosting provider can also be beneficial as it cuts down on the energy it takes to transfer your website data over longer distances, but it is not without its drawbacks if you have a global audience.
2. Reduce image sizes and video content
By checking that your website’s assets are sized correctly and properly optimised, loading speeds will improve and less energy will be used. This is also beneficial for your users’ experience by enhancing performance. Unnecessarily large images are one of the most common ways to negatively impact load speeds and user experience so it’s worth checking your site.
Video content is the biggest drain on a website’s energy use. If video content is necessary, you should reduce its impact by using a third party video host such as Vimeo or YouTube which will compress and optimise your video for whatever device it is being viewed on each time.
3. Have a content clear-out
Your Content Management System (CMS) will hold on to all media you upload even if it is not currently being used in your website. It is also worth looking at older pages that are no longer relevant, provide traffic or value. These will be using energy to store in a data centre, so by making sure the content you store is always useful and streamlined, you are reducing energy wastage.
4. Sustainable UX/UI
By applying core UX principles such as mobile-first design, which prioritises streamlined layouts and lightweight assets, designers naturally reduce the resources required to load and navigate a site. Sustainable UI choices, such as simplified colour palettes and efficient typography, further enhance energy efficiency without compromising visual appeal.
5. Caching and CDN Usage
Implementing caching strategies stores frequently used data locally, reducing the need to reload everything from the server. Similarly, using content delivery networks (CDNs) ensures data is served from locations closer to users, reducing the energy needed for data.
Need some help?
Curious about your website’s environmental impact? Consider conducting a website sustainability audit. Our team can assess your site and provide practical, eco-friendly solutions to help you reduce energy usage and lower your digital carbon footprint. Best of all, we’ll do it for free! Get in contact with us today.
