How to minimize the climate impact of your website

Owen Rogers | June 3, 2025

7 min read

Most things that we do in life contribute to climate change, including reading this article!

Even though browsing the web doesn’t feel like the usual activities that we associate with causing global warming, like driving a car or taking an international flight, the device that you’re using to read this post, as well as the servers and networking infrastructure used to send it to you, all require electricity to run. Depending on where you live and the location of the servers sending you data, there’s a good chance that electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. This is not to mention the emissions from mining, manufacturing, and shipping, as well as the technology involved in making this happen.

In fact, information and communication technology (ICT) accounts for around 3.7% of global CO2 emissions. This is about equal to the CO2 emissions of all air travel around the world. If the ICT industry were a country, it would be the 7th-largest-emitting nation.

That’s not to say using the Internet is bad. In fact, it’s typically much more efficient than the alternatives. A video call produces fewer emissions than driving or flying to an in-person meeting. Reading an article online emits less than printing a newspaper or a magazine. So this has to be considered in context.

But knowing that there are emissions associated with our online activity means that we should strive to make sustainable choices to minimize our impact and tread lightly on the planet.

If you are looking to launch a new website, we want to share some ideas about how to do this as sustainably as possible.

Sustainable web hosting

One of the most impactful decisions that you make is choosing where to host your website. Your website will likely run in a data center full of computers and networking equipment that requires a lot of energy to run and keep cool. Choosing a hosting provider using a data center focused on sustainability makes a big difference.

Most data centers are not directly powered by their own solar or wind farms. Instead, they draw electricity from the grid where they are located. Choosing a region where the grid is clean and primarily powered by renewable energy will help minimize the emissions associated with hosting your website.

If you are hosting your website with Namecheap, their EU data center located in Amsterdam is 100% powered by electricity from renewable resources. The data center operator has signed The Climate Pledge™ and is committed to achieving Net Zero emissions by 2040.

If you run your website in a data center powered by renewable energy, you are also eligible to receive a Green Web Check badge. Green Web Check is a service operated by the Green Web Foundation, which has the mission to reach a fossil fuel-free Internet by 2030. They maintain a large database of data centers powered by renewable energy.

Other characteristics of a sustainable web host include:

The energy efficiency of their operations (referred to as power usage effectiveness, or PUE) – efficient data centers should have a PUE lower than 1.2
Equipment longevity – given the emissions associated with manufacturing digital devices, the longer that we can keep them running, the better. Look for data centers that repair and extend the use of their equipment.
E-waste – when devices reach end-of-life, ensuring that those devices are processed and recycled responsibly is an imperative. Choose a provider that clearly indicates how they recycle and dispose of their equipment.

Location marker indicating a green datacenter

Sustainable domain names

Your domain name has a carbon footprint of its own. Anytime a visitor to your website enters your domain name into their browser, their device needs to look up where on the Internet your website lives.

This is done using the Domain Name System (DNS). Thousands of domain name servers running in data centers all around the world are set up to respond to those DNS requests as quickly as possible.

Each top-level domain (TLD) has a set of authoritative name servers that are involved in responding to these requests. Typically, this fleet of name servers makes up the largest portion of the IT infrastructure managed by domain registries.

Fortunately, a number of domain registries measure and work to reduce their carbon footprint operations and are operating as carbon-neutral. This includes the following TLDs:

.be (Belgium)
.ca (Canada)
.eco
.fr (France)
.se (Sweden)
.uk (United Kingdom)

You can rest assured that if you use one of these domain extensions, any emissions associated with their operations will be taken care of. If you are curious to learn more, the .eco registry has compiled a review of the carbon footprint of these TLDs.

Low-carbon websites

Once you have picked your hosting provider and registered your domain name, you need to make a number of decisions about the design of your website that impact its sustainability. Here are a few of the key considerations:

Use a static website: Websites that serve static HTML pages require less electricity to operate than those built on a content management system (CMS). They also tend to be more performant, are simpler and more secure, and require less work to maintain.
Minimize your use of JavaScript: while JavaScript helps make your website more interactive, parsing and executing large JS framework files can be quite CPU-intensive for your client’s device, requiring more power to render. Where feasible, avoid client-side rendering frameworks like React. Using only the JavaScript required by your website will also boost performance and help SEO.
Support dark mode: display screens are typically the largest consumer of energy on digital devices. Modern OLED screens require less power to render dark pixels than light ones. Supporting a theme where webpages can be rendered with a dark background can reduce the energy needs of your website by 20%-40%.

As these considerations can shape how you build your website, it’s typically best to consider them up front, as changing them later can be challenging.

Understanding your digital carbon footprint

Once your website is up and running, you may want to estimate its carbon footprint when operating it.

At this point, it can be tricky to directly measure the emissions associated with your website. Most hosting providers and digital platforms do not provide data to customers showing their share of the footprint.

However, this is changing. There are a few sustainability leaders who make it easy to directly see the emissions associated with your use of their services:

If you don’t have access to direct data from your hosting provider, you can still approximate the carbon footprint of your website. A common method for doing this is using the Sustainable Web Design method. If you know the number of visitors to your website over time and approximately how much data is transmitted from those visits, you can use this model to approximate your website’s carbon footprint.

Being green is not as hard as it seems

While thinking about the enormity of humanity’s impact on the planet, it is important to consider what we can do individually to reduce our impact. While the topics mentioned above may be new, learning and adopting them is not as challenging as it might seem. There are online communities, like ClimateAction.tech, that you can join. These communities are full of friendly people like you who care about technology and sustainability, and to whom you can reach out for support.