Eco-Friendly Website Solutions
and Tips for Purpose-Driven Brands

Our carbon footprint as modern humans is felt everywhere. This is true even in the digital realm, where it may or may not surprise you to learn that the internet is one of the biggest culprits of environmental damage today. According to research led by different experts behind the Sustainable Web Manifesto, if the internet were its own country, it would be considered the fourth largest polluter globally, and its numbers continue to grow at an alarming rate.

Much of this pollution is created by larger online operations that consume more energy than the average website. However, all websites contribute to this environmental impact at some level, especially if their owners haven’t intentionally selected green partners, web hosts, and design and development features for their sites.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through what we’ve learned so far about creating an eco-friendly website, as well as some of the tools and solutions that can help you achieve your own sustainability goals. This is an ongoing learning process for us, but we’re happy to share our journey to this point.

Green Web Hosting

Web hosting providers that don’t optimize their setups and resources waste extensive energy on their clients’ behalf. This is especially true for web hosting providers that operate in traditional data centers: These data centers require a lot of power, usually from nonrenewable energy sources, to stay up and running.

To address this problem, many providers are changing the way they work. These companies are taking steps to power data centers with renewable energy sources, such as solar, wind, and hydroelectric power. Other sustainable steps they’re taking include investing in more efficient hardware, cooling systems, and power management tools, as well as in projects and initiatives that offset carbon emissions.

Selecting a green web hosting provider is one of the easiest and most effective steps you can take to make your website more eco-friendly. Simply choose a green web hosting provider with proven results. This might look like a company that has earned a Green-e certification, or a brand that has outlined clear steps and policies on their website to illustrate how they achieve greener results.

Green Web Hosting Solutions to Consider

These are some of the most popular and compelling green web hosting solutions on the market today:

• GreenGeeks: GreenGeeks is a web hosting provider that offers a variety of plan options and hosting formats, committing to greener practices like planting trees around the world and 300% renewable energy matching.

• Viridio: Previously known as AISO.net, Viridio is a web hosting provider that relies primarily on solar energy to power its data centers. The company takes many steps to improve its ecological impact, one of which is its partnership with Ecologi for employee carbon footprint offsetting and carbon avoidance projects.

• Cloudflare: A global cloud services and networking company, Cloudflare offers a variety of services and solutions, including web hosting. According to the Green Web Foundation’s Green Web Check portal, Cloudflare is the hosting provider for many websites in its green energy directory.

• EcoHosting: EcoHosting is an affordable UK-only web hosting solution that provides hands-on support for that audience. This is a carbon-neutral solutions provider that supports eco projects throughout the UK.

Eco-Conscious E-Commerce

A growing segment of businesses is building e-commerce applications or sections of their website to handle online customer purchases. The problem? Constant customer traffic and small purchasing actions/clicks can use substantial energy. On top of that, the e-commerce element of a business may also have shipping, packaging, and product return components that cause additional eco stress.

From a website perspective, the best thing you can do is reduce and optimize your product image sizes, clean up the code for your product listings, and take other similar steps to what we recommended in the CMS and CRM section. It may also be worth investing in a dedicated e-commerce platform from vendors that care about environmental improvement efforts.

Green E-Commerce Solutions to Consider

If you’re interested in working with e-commerce platforms that prioritize sustainability conversations and efforts, here are some to watch right now:

• Shopify: Shopify is a carbon-neutral, cloud-based e-commerce platform provider that supports online storefronts and management features. It is vocal about its sustainability goals and efforts, especially the Shopify Sustainability Fund, its Planet app for carbon-neutral shipping, and its unique feature that allows climate companies to sell and manage carbon credits within the platform.

• Adobe Commerce: Formerly Magento, Adobe Commerce is an e-commerce segment of the greater Adobe ecosystem that supports businesses of all sizes, but particularly medium and larger businesses. Adobe is committed to building LEED-certified offices and has established both a 100% renewable energy goal and several science-based targets.

• Beam: Beam offers sellers a marketing and e-commerce engine that allows them to find and retain customers through their shared values and provides gamified benefits based on these values. From a sustainability perspective, Beam partners with many vetted eco-friendly organizations and has prevented over 2 billion pounds of CO2 emissions.

• HubSpot and Salesforce, mentioned in the previous CMS and CRM section, also have e-commerce hubs that can be optimized for sustainability.

Sustainability-Driven Web Development and Design

The sustainability of your web development and design efforts is more about the choices you make rather than the tools you use. That being said, several tools out there can help you monitor the quality of your efforts and improve the speed, performance, and power usage efficiencies of your website. 

In addition to the tools we’ve listed below, we recommend:

• Updating and compressing your file formats.
• Being mindful of the fonts you use and how they’re loaded onto your site. 
• Cleaning up and consolidating code wherever possible.
• Using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) frameworks when it makes sense.
• Optimizing your website for dark mode.

Green Web Development and Design Solutions to Consider

Dozens of tools and frameworks can help you improve sustainable web development and design. These are a handful that stand out to us right now:

• Google Lighthouse: Google Lighthouse is a performance auditing tool that is integrated into Chrome DevTools, making it simple to monitor website performance, SEO, and other factors. A significant recent development: The Green Web Foundation has developed a Lighthouse plugin to audit and assess green hosting performance specifically.

• Milligram: Milligram is a CSS framework that emphasizes minimalism for faster speeds and greater sustainability. Its documentation is user-friendly, and the framework functions well on a wide variety of modern browsers.

• Hugo: Hugo is an open-source static site generator with an active community of users and frequent releases for constant improvement. Its speed, simplicity, and community make it agile enough to keep up with sustainability initiatives.

Other Tips for Creating and Maintaining Sustainable Websites

The tips above cover quite a bit of ground, but there’s more to this sustainability project. If you’re looking for other ways to improve your eco efforts and track your progress toward sustainability goals, these tips can help:

• Set SMART goals for your own sustainability plans, holding yourself and your team accountable with subtasks and milestones along the way.
• Use a website carbon calculator to calculate your environmental impact.
• Improve website performance wherever possible with frequent web audits, especially with tools like Ecograder.
• Find and download browser developer and optimization tools.
• Choose CDNs with green data center standards.
• Optimize web caching and server loads.
• Create and maintain efficient, clean code.
• Minimize AI usage and AI features, which can use disproportionate amounts of energy for simple tasks and queries.
• Keep up with new opportunities for sustainable web development and design.
• Partner with web experts who prioritize sustainability in their development and design choices.

From Vision to Reality: A Website You Can Be Proud of

Want to hear something both scary and invigorating about creating an eco-friendly website? There’s always room for improvement. While it can be an overwhelming process to make your website greener, the best part is that nearly every step you take also improves the user interface and user experience for your website, making it a win for business and the planet.

As customers grow in their demands for quick load times, easy navigation, and user-friendly websites — not to mention their demands for brands that operate ethically and transparently — now is a great time to create a new website or update an existing one to reflect eco-friendly standards.

If you’re not sure where to get started, we get it. This is a staggering and constantly evolving landscape. Contact us today to learn how Mane Impact can help you achieve your web sustainability goals and create a website you can be proud of on all fronts.