Low‑Impact Web Design: How to Create a Sustainable Website

Why Sustainable Websites Matter

Digital’s growing environmental impact

Digital technologies now account for nearly 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, the dirty truth of digital is that it’s more than the aviation industry, yet anyone measuring carbon will do so in airmiles.

As data use surges, AI use increases electricity and water usage will be seriously under strain over the next decade or two. From e-commerce platforms to streaming services, every interaction adds up.

I’m not sure any business has no digital footprint, but how many of us measure the impact? One thing most have in common is a website, and that’s an easy, impactful, place to start.

Every extra kilobyte, every hidden tracking script and every slow‑loading page adds to your site’s footprint: the average web page today emits around 0.36 g of CO₂ per view. The Sustainable Digital Infrastructure Alliance (SDIA) outlines just how much energy the internet consumes (and how urgent action is).

Our own Sustainable Digital Transformation guide breaks this down in detail, offering a clearer picture of the invisible cost of digital growth and what action you can take.

What makes a website truly sustainable: low-impact web design and green hosting

A sustainable website is designed to use fewer resources from the ground up. Low-impact web design prioritises energy-efficient layouts, streamlined content, and minimal page weight.

This may include:

• Choosing green hosting providers powered by renewable energy. You can learn more about our eco-friendly hosting.
• Designing lightweight, accessible layouts with minimal load.
• Optimising content using compressed images, thoughtful copy, and fewer unnecessary scripts.
• Reducing dependencies on weighty themes, plugins, tracking or integrations.

Think about this, every time someone visits your website, a set of files is downloaded to their device (images, fonts, scripts, videos, and more).

If your site is bloated, every visit increases your website’s carbon footprint, consuming unnecessary energy. Now multiply that by 10,000 users a month, or 100,000 over the year, see where I’m going?

Even a 20% reduction in file size isn’t just about that one page, it cuts your carbon impact across every visit.

This isn’t just better for the planet, it’s a step toward digital sustainability. It’s better for performance, user experience, and accessibility, which Search Engines all consider too, its win, win, win.

Design for Humans and the Planet

Simple, accessible design saves energy

When a user loads your website, every element (from fonts and images to scripts and media) requires energy to download and render, as well as all of those files needing to be stored on a machine somewhere.

Whether you need to or not, adopting principles from the Government Design System such as clear hierarchy, consistent spacing and meaningful alternative text not only improves usability but also reduces unnecessary code and file size.

For more on accessibility best practices, see our article on what is accessibility in digital.

By prioritising accessibility, you naturally steer the design toward efficiency rather than fluff.

Reduce third‑party scripts and custom fonts

Third‑party widgets, tag managers and heavy custom fonts might seem essential but they often weigh down your site.

For example, you can get really customisable WordPress themes, and they will load dozens of fonts even if you don’t use them. Fancy widgets can bring in custom fonts too (or other excessive scripts for functionality that doesn’t get used) .

When we were building this site we added our custom brand fonts and the page load was 1.2 MB (massive for a web page).

Digital Beacon is a great tool as it shows what elements are causing the page weight. Get your friendly AI helper to make recommendations and you may find yourself able to reduce your page size down considerably.

We achieved significant page weight reduction, bringing fonts down from 1.2mb to 100kB, by using a font compressor to remove hundreds of unused glyphs.

Prioritise fast, responsive user journeys

Every extra second a page takes to become interactive adds expense, both in device energy and user patience.

A fast journey doesn’t just mean performance optimisation; it means designing fewer clicks, clearer paths and lighter pages.

Tools like Microsoft Clarity and Google Search Console & Analytics help you measure what slows users down, then you can act (ironically, these also add more weight to the site – more on that later).

Search engines have used page speed as a ranking factor for a long time, so slow websites don’t just frustrate users, they drop down the results.

To truly do web performance optimisation for sustainability it isn’t just about speed, it’s about reducing data transfer, battery use, and processing demands.

For a deeper dive on how speed connects to SEO, check out our article on the 3 elements to SEO.

So low‑impact design isn’t just good for the planet, it’s good for retention, conversion and ultimately brand loyalty.

Sustainable WordPress Website Design

Choosing lean themes and avoiding bloat

As I mentioned earlier, using a heavy theme with loads of built‑in features you’ll never use, is adding loads of extra code, larger file sizes and more processing for every visitor.

But for the layman it’s hard to know, I’ll try not to get to techie.

We use something similar to this, B4st (an open‑source starter theme we use) this holds a frontend framework called bootstrap which displays common layouts you will see on the web and connects to the WordPress ecosystem.

This whittles the theme size down the file footprint to a fraction of what a typical premium theme carries.

To check your theme’s size, go to your WordPress dashboard → Appearance → Theme File Editor. From there, you can see the list of theme files, if theres hundreds of even thousands then its likely doing a lot more than you need.

Or, better yet, log into your hosting control panel (like cPanel or File Manager), navigate to wp-content/themes, and download your active theme’s folder. Then right-click it and check its size, if it’s over 10MB zipped, it’s probably too big.

Smart plugin management for performance

Plugins are a fabulous way of adding functionality to a site without custom code but when you install dozens of plugins the site becomes harder to maintain and slower to deliver.

Within each comes a bunch of code and scripts that can conflict with others, very few sites will have all of the same plugins therefore it is hard to predict exactly how they will play together.

They also cant assume another plugin uses the base level of librarys that plugins are built on, so there potential for duplicate files or out of date ones to be loaded.

We’ve walked away from projects where over 80 plugins were active, constant breaks, conflicts and no one knew why each plugin was installed.

Scope out the site, document every plugin you install, track its version, purpose and performance cost.

Fewer, well‑chosen plugins = better function and less overhead.

Hosting and caching for low‑carbon delivery

Choosing the right hosting provider is crucial for a low‑impact WordPress site.

Look for green credentials, renewable energy usage (do the green web check) and secure solid architecture with good support.

If using an agency to manage this, then ask them who they will use as their supplier. It has always amazed us that the size and importance of some really high profile sites can be on such ropey infrastructures.

Then add caching and a content delivery network (CDN) to reduce load time and data transfer.

Website caching (like your web browser) basically store pre‑rendered pages and static assets so the server does less legwork back and forth and visitors get faster access.

Combine server‑side caching with a CDN (e.g., Cloudflare) and you reduce distance, latency and energy use, all key steps in a sustainable delivery stack.

Content That Doesn’t Cost the Earth

Optimise images and videos for minimal load

Images exist on every site, the sizes vary massively. A pic from a modern phone is probably 5-10 megabytes nowadays (and maybe 5000px wide) – in website terms that’s massive, each picture should be resized to less than 2000px and ideally a tenth of one megabyte.

Use canva or adobe to resize then something like TinyPNG will help you compress images manually.

For WordPress users, the Smush plugin can automate it upon uploading within WordPress and go back through old ones.

Like everything, it’s better to understand the file size yourself and tweak the compression but anything is better, we have seen sites that images made up well over 90% of their data and page load time, if you do nothing else – do this.

Worth noting that compression naturally happenes through new standards, formats like AVIF & SVG are expected by search engines and offer over 50 % file size savings compared with JPEG. 

Only use media when it adds value

Before you upload that background video or load a dozen stock photography slides, ask: does this help the user, support the story, or just look pretty?

If the answer leans toward “just pretty”, maybe skip it?

Ask yourself: what will the user remember? What will they gain? If you’re unsure, A/B test whether it changes behaviour and look for stats around more engagement, longer visits, better conversion.

Write clean, purposeful copy

Your blog doesn’t need to echo every keyword in existence, in fact that will hinder your progress.

It needs to speak to the reader, solve a problem, and keep the reader’s time.

Write short paragraphs, avoid jargon, and keep sentences simple.

A clean, well‑written article loads faster (less code, fewer characters) and is easier to scan. Accessibility and readability aren’t optional, they’re part of a sustainable content strategy.

Applying Sustainable Thinking to Strategy

Plan efficient site structures and user journeys

A sustainable website isn’t just about a smaller architecture, cleaner code or compressed images. It starts with purposeful planning otherwise all that will get lost in the process.

Streamlined site structures make life easier for users and search engines. Every extra click, every buried page adds load and confusion (literally and figuratively).

At Vu, we often guide clients through simplified user journeys as part of our content planning process, helping them strip back bloated menus and redundant sections.

In one case, working with Department of Health & Social Care, refining the structure helped their audience access vital information faster, and improved site performance at scale.

Think fewer clicks, clearer paths, and a laser focus on what your users actually need.

Maintain a lean content lifecycle

Digital hoarding is a thing, and it comes at a cost.

Old blog posts that no one reads, duplicate product pages, outdated announcements. These all take up space, add complexity, and increase your site’s carbon footprint.

Maintaining a lean content lifecycle means regularly auditing, updating, or retiring content that no longer serves a purpose.

Our content plan guide outlines how to identify underperforming pages and repurpose or remove them with intention.

Tools like Screaming Frog or a simple site:yourdomain.com search on google can help highlight what’s lurking in the shadows.

Fewer, better pages deliver more value. Not just to your users, but to the planet too.

Measure What Matters

Track environmental impact with tools

Sustainability starts with awareness. Free tools like Website Carbon and Digital Beacon let you see just how energy-hungry your site really is.

They’ll score your site based on load time, energy consumption, and whether your hosting runs on renewable energy.

We often use these tools to help clients visualise the impact of even small design and content changes, and it’s always a moment of surprise when a hero image outweighs an entire blog post or category!

Use analytics responsibly

Measuring performance shouldn’t come at the cost of your users’ privacy or performance, but of course with WordPress this is often added via plugins and adds more weight.

For example, tracking and advertising‑related scripts can expand your site’s data load by roughly 21%, meaning more carbon, not more value. 

Theres lots, and they do different things. Sure, install and use Microsoft Clarity to review heatmaps, but if you haven’t looked at heatmap or done anything with it for 3 months – does it still need to be there?

Then theres data, traditional analytics platforms like GA4 are powerful but come with data trade-offs. That’s where privacy-first alternatives like Plausible or Fathom step in, giving you the insights you need without tracking every move a user makes.

If you’re using cookies or third-party scripts, make sure you’re clear and compliant.

Want a new lightweight WordPress website?

Ready to make your WordPress site faster, leaner and greener? We help brands trim the bloat, boost performance, and build with purpose. Book a free call to talk through your current setup and how we can help you create a site that’s built to last (and load fast).