Digital Sustainability
Why Your Website's Carbon Footprint Matters
The internet is responsible for roughly 3.7% of global carbon emissions. That's about the same as the airline industry. Most people don't think about it, but every page load burns electricity somewhere, and the numbers add up fast.
Founder, Oasis of Change •
The hidden cost of every page load
When someone visits a website, their device sends a request to a data center running 24/7 on grid electricity. That server processes the request, pulls from databases, assembles assets, and pushes everything back across network infrastructure that also requires power. Then the visitor's device decodes and renders it all, drawing more energy still.
One page view is tiny. But a mid-sized nonprofit site with 50,000 monthly visits can generate over 600 kg of CO2 a year. That's roughly a round trip flight from Vancouver to Toronto. Larger organizations hit the tens of thousands.
What makes a website carbon-heavy?
It comes down to three things: how much data each visit transfers (page weight), where the servers are hosted and what powers them, and how efficiently the code runs on both ends.
Images are usually the worst offender. A hero image saved at 4000px wide and served uncompressed can weigh 3-5 MB on its own, which is about 10 times what the entire page should be. Stack on custom fonts in multiple weights, a few third-party tracking scripts, and unminified CSS, and you've got a page that's burning energy for no good reason.
By the numbers
"The average web page now transfers over 2.5 MB of data — more than triple what it was a decade ago. Most of that increase comes from images, video, and third-party scripts that many users never interact with."
What organizations can do today
The nice thing is that a lighter website is also a faster website, and a cheaper one to host. These things line up.
Start simple: compress and properly size images, use modern formats like WebP or AVIF, lazy load anything below the fold, and cut the third-party scripts you don't actually need. Pick a hosting provider that runs on renewable energy, or at least one that's transparent about its energy sources.
If you're building a new site, set a performance budget before you start designing. A 500 KB page weight cap forces real decisions about what belongs on the page. You'll end up with something that loads faster and costs the planet less. Usually it looks better too, because clutter got cut.
Measuring and reporting
You can't fix what you haven't measured. Tools like the Website Carbon Calculator and Google Lighthouse give you a baseline. We track carbon savings across every project on our Impact Dashboard, published for anyone to check.
As more of daily life moves online, the environmental cost of the web keeps growing. Organizations that measure, optimize, and report honestly now are going to be the ones people trust later. The bar is still low. That won't last.