Sustainable web design is an increasingly popular approach to designing websites with environmental impact in mind. In this guide, we explain what sustainable web design is and its importance in 2025, before sharing seven top tips on how to make your website more environmentally friendly.
What is Sustainable Web Design?
According to a report by the Columbia Climate School in June 2023, internet use is responsible for 2.5% – 3.7% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. And, with the growth of AI, it is likely responsible for an even higher percentage today. Shockingly, it accounts for more greenhouse gas emissions than the aviation industry.
Sustainable web design is an approach to creating websites that favours energy efficiency, decreases carbon emissions, and minimises overall environmental impact. In simple terms, it aims to make the internet more climate-friendly.
Why is Sustainable Web Design Important in 2025?
Sustainable web design has never been more relevant than now. There is a growing awareness of digital carbon footprints and their impact. As a result, consumers are increasingly demanding greener online experiences, and failure to address this can result in lost customer loyalty and reputational damage.
Furthermore, many governments and industry bodies are placing increased emphasis on sustainability standards, so eco-friendly design is becoming more and more necessary.
Aside from consumer and government expectations, sustainable websites are beneficial to the businesses that create them, too. Environmentally-friendly design leads to faster and more accessible sites, which in turn improve SEO and conversion rates. So, while sustainable web design supports the planet, it’s also advantageous for business.
Did You Know? At topclick, we offer web design in Woking and beyond, creating tailored and user-friendly sites that drive both engagement and growth.
7 Ways to Make Your Website More Sustainable
Now that we have explained what sustainable web design is and why it’s important, below we share seven strategies for making your website more eco-friendly.
1. Optimise Images and Videos
One of the biggest culprits for load time and energy consumption is high-resolution imagery. Therefore, a best practice is to be strict on the images that you include on your website. Only include images that are necessary and add value, and reduce the resolution of and compress the ones that you do use as much as possible.
The same consideration should be taken for any videos on your site. While video content has become increasingly popular over recent years and is an effective tool for engagement, it is also responsible for high energy consumption and longer load times. To overcome this, limit the number of videos on your site, again, only including ones that are truly needed. The ones you do keep on your site should be optimised in terms of size and length, and the resolution should be reduced as much as possible.
Additionally, use a third-party host for video content (such as YouTube or Vimeo) as these platforms are optimised for video streaming and offload bandwidth from your server. Avoid setting your video content to autoplay, as this requires more data and processing power.
2. Use Lazy Load for Media
Lazy loading is when the loading of resources, such as videos or images, is deferred until actually needed. Rather than everything loading on a page at once, which can negatively impact website performance and user experience, lazy loading only loads resources when the visitor scrolls down, requests, or interacts with them. This technique reduces energy use and the initial data load, particularly on slower networks or mobiles.
3. Evaluate User Journeys
If your website is difficult to navigate and understand, visitors may spend a long time looking for what they need, clicking around the site. This is poor from a user experience point of view, but it also leads to more energy consumption, server requests, and emissions.
A good approach to this is to imagine you are a visitor to your own site and see how many steps it takes for you to complete a certain action, such as signing up for a mailing list or purchasing tickets for an event. You may find it is not as straightforward as you imagined. From this test, you can refine your site navigation and make it easier for users to find content on your site while lowering energy consumption.
Pro Tip: A great way to improve site navigation is to evaluate all your meta tags and ensure they are as clear as possible so users know what they will find when they click through from search engines.
4. Reduce Custom Fonts
While custom fonts can be visually pleasing and give your site a point of difference, they substantially increase the file size of pages, particularly when using numerous weights or styles. This leads to longer page load times and data transfer, causing higher energy use.
Limit the amount of custom fonts you use to make the site lighter, quicker, and more eco-friendly.
5. Streamline Third-Party Scripts
Third-party scripts, such as chat widgets, video embeds, and external analytics tools, load extra data from outside servers, slowing down your website, straining servers, and increasing energy consumption.
Evaluate the third-party scripts you are using and remove any that are not essential. Not only will this improve website sustainability, but it also helps to optimise page speed, performance, and privacy.
6. Switch to Green Hosting
Green hosting is a form of web hosting that incorporates strategies to reduce environmental impact. These tactics include utilising renewable energy sources to power servers, disposing of old hardware safely, using energy-efficient infrastructure, and investing in responsible carbon offsetting. By switching to a more environmentally friendly hosting provider, businesses can substantially and efficiently cut their website’s carbon footprint. This strategy helps increase sustainability without any changes to a website’s design or content.
7. Design for Longevity
Often, websites are built and designed with the consideration of short-term goals rather than long-term goals. This leads to regular redevelopment and redesigns, wasting resources, as old websites are removed and rebuilt from square one. Therefore, by consciously designing for longevity, you can keep your website relevant and functional into the future, saving both money and effort.
Here are a few ways to future-proof your site:
- Avoid incorporating trends as these quickly become irrelevant, and redesigning is then necessary.
- Select scalable content management systems (CMS) so that they can grow with your business and deal with increasing amounts of traffic, functionality, and content without performance or usability being affected.
- Use clean and maintainable code that can be adjusted without a complete rewrite being required.
With more than 20 years in operation, topclick is an award-winning digital marketing agency in Surrey dedicated to improving our clients’ online presence. Our professional team has the knowledge and expertise to provide customised and effective marketing solutions to support business growth. Contact us today to learn how we can help your company improve its digital presence.