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Digit-One goes green
With a resource-efficient website, you help make the internet a little cleaner. We take care of the rest and make sure your new website produces as little CO₂ as possible.
Green websites: sustainable web design for a cleaner internet
Around 4% of the world's electricity is consumed by digital technologies, and that share is growing rapidly with AI and streaming
In the early nineties, the building blocks of the WWW were laid at CERN in Switzerland. Today it consists of many billions of devices, used every day by billions of people. Even though data is not as tangible as a physical machine: every bit flowing through the networks creates CO₂ emissions. And the data centres behind it are among the fastest-growing electricity consumers in the world.
What impact does your website have on the planet?
With the right decisions, you can drastically reduce the CO₂ emissions of your everyday life, and those of your website along with it. For context: according to the Website Carbon Calculator, an average website produces around 0.4 grams of CO₂ per page view. With 10,000 views a month, that adds up to over 40 kilograms a year. Sounds small? Multiply it by many millions of websites and your own browsing habits, and grams quickly turn into millions of tonnes. If the internet were a country, it would rank among the world's largest electricity consumers.
What is sustainable web design?
(normal) Sustainable web design (also called green web design) means building websites that consume as little energy and data as possible. Three levers work together: lean code and efficient technology, so every page only loads what it really needs. Data-efficient images, videos and fonts, so less has to be transferred. And efficient hosting, so delivery costs as little electricity as possible. The welcome side effect: these very levers make websites faster, easier to use and more visible in search engines.
How your website becomes climate-friendlier
Planting trees: our reforestation days
Every so often we leave our comfortable desks and swap sneakers for hiking boots to plant trees together. They bind CO₂ over decades and give us a good reason to return to our clients' projects with soil under our fingernails. But what matters even more to us is what happens before that: building websites so that as little CO₂ as possible is created in the first place.
Sustainable by design: how we build today
Our websites are built on a modern stack that ships with many green web design methods by default. Pages are statically pre-rendered and delivered via a global CDN instead of being recomputed on every request. Images are served automatically in modern formats and at exactly the size each device needs. We host our fonts ourselves, with no detours via third-party servers. And dark mode saves additional energy on modern displays. In short: performance, sustainability and good rankings are not an add-on here, they are architecture.
Want to dig deeper? Our insights cover why sustainable web design and good user experience go hand in hand, and what accessibility contributes.
Increase Performance and safe CO₂
Performance
Sustainability is on the table right from the start of every project. The biggest advantage: performance, user experience and sustainability are closely connected.
Your page speed and the sustainability of your site go hand in hand. The less unnecessary data is transferred, the faster the page loads and the less power is consumed.
So if your website works efficiently, it consumes less computing power and less energy. Your users expect to find what they are looking for quickly. Short loading times and a fast page help with this and keep the bounce rate lower.
Content
When it comes to saving energy, every click counts. And if fewer clicks are needed on your site to find what users are looking for, not only are fewer server requests necessary, but your site's users are happier and stay on it longer. This, in turn, leads to happier customers and more revenue.
UI/UX
Sustainable web design is efficient and accessible. A good user experience for mobile and desktop users improves accessibility, as users can easily access a website regardless of their hardware. Mobile-first web design also helps avoid loading large files for desktop computers, which improves the speed and energy efficiency of a website. However, mobile-first has even greater potential to improve the sustainability of the web by shifting the focus of design from power-hungry desktops to smaller, more efficient mobile devices.
Visibility
Search engine optimisation before and after launch has a direct impact on a website's sustainability. This factor is often overlooked in development, yet stable organic traffic is at the core of long-term sustainability. A website that search engines can crawl easily gets indexed faster and found more often. Your users need fewer clicks and less transferred data to find exactly what they are looking for.
Curious about the performance of your current website?
We use a whole range of tools to analyse our green websites. If you want a quick and easy check of your website's ecological footprint: the Website Carbon Calculator shows you in seconds.
