Sustainable design for our website

When designing and developing our website, we focussed on ecological, social and economic sustainability.

Lightweight design to reduce climate impact

Every website, app and software generates greenhouse gas emissions. But we can reduce them.

Why is this important?

Our website achieves a Website Carbon Rating of A+

  • One visit to our homepage generates only 0.06 g CO2 equivalent. This is cleaner than 95% of all websites.
  • With 10,000 pages displayed per month, this would be 6.38kg CO2 equivalent per year — about the same as heating 925 cups of tea.1

Website Carbon Rating

Website Carbon Rating A+ on a scale of A+ to F

CO2 emissions per page view

0.06 g

Sustainable websites are not only good for the environment — but also for business

Companies benefit from sustainable websites in various ways. By combining these factors, sustainable websites can attract more visitors and ultimately increase sales:

  • Faster loading times: Smaller, well-structured websites load faster. This keeps visitors engaged and allows more people to access the website, even those with slower internet connections.
  • Better search engine rankings: Smaller, user-friendly and easily accessible websites tend to rank higher in search engine results, allowing more potential customers to find the website.
  • Better usability: Well-designed websites are easier to navigate. Satisfied visitors are more likely to trust the brand and purchase a product or service.
  • Building trust and loyalty: Websites that respect user privacy and avoid manipulative marketing tactics build trust. This can lead to increased customer loyalty and repeat business.

Performance

Lighthouse Rating 95 of 100

Accessibility

Lighthouse Rating 100 of 100

Best Practices

Lighthouse Rating 100 of 100

SEO

Lighthouse Rating 100 of 100

Our homepage loads on a mobile device within 2.9 seconds (desktop 1.0 seconds) and thus receives a performance rating of 95 (desktop 99).2

How we achieved this

Our web designer Stefanie Kruse | reThink the Web designed and built this website using the following strategies for a sustainable web:

  • Sustainable hosting: Our sustainable hosting provider hosts this website with renewable energy and contributes to climate protection through reforestation and project work
  • Open source technology: This website is based on WordPress, an open source platform that has powered more than 40% of the internet for over 20 years
  • Sustainable theme: This website uses a lightweight theme that enables accessible, responsive design and dark mode. With this theme we are not dependent on continuous web development support.
  • Minimal design: This website does not use unnecessary or heavy plugins or features. The design favours lightweight components over video backgrounds, fancy animations or large images.
  • Accessibility: To ensure that anyone—regardless of circumstance or ability—can use this website, it has been designed, developed and tested with accessibility in mind.
  • Minimal data collection: To protect user privacy and the environment, this website collects only necessary data. It works without cookies that require consent, so you do not need to see a cookie banner. The collection of visit statistics is anonymised and in accordance with GDPR.

There are a number of design changes that can make websites more sustainable. For more information on these and other strategies, contact our web designer Stefanie Kruse | reThink the Web.

Why is sustainable web design important?

Like any digital product, a website has an impact on the environment. Every click and every tap starts a dialogue with data centres that require electricity and large amounts of water for cooling—around the clock. Even more energy is needed to power telecommunication networks and our devices. Since most of this energy is still generated from fossil fuels, the internet also has a large carbon footprint.

In 2024, the average size of a website has grown to 2.665 MB3. ach visit to a page generates around 0.8 grams of CO24. That may not sound like much, but it quickly adds up.

With 10,000 page views per month, a single page would generate 96 kg of CO2 over the course of a year. It would take 48 trees in a whole year to absorb that amount of carbon. That’s just one website—and there are millions of websites.

If the internet were a country it would be the second largest polluter.

With 14.5 megatons, the internet has the second-largest carbon footprint after China.

The carbon footprint of the Internet compared to countries.5

You also want a sustainable website?

Please get in touch with our web designer Stefanie Kruse | reThink the Web.

  1. Source: websitecarbon.com
    Note: The results refer solely to the homepage. I chose the homepage for this analysis because this is where most visitors are likely to land. The results for other subpages may differ. However, you will find a display of CO2 emissions in the footer of each page ↩︎
  2. Source: Google Lighthouse Report (Mobile).
    Note: The results refer solely to the homepage when accessed for the first time from a mobile device. ↩︎
  3. Source: HTTP Archive Page Weight Report October 2024 ↩︎
  4. Source: Website Carbon FAQ ↩︎
  5. All figures shown are million tons of CO2 equivalent and refer to the year 2023.
    Sources: impaakt.com and The European Commission. ↩︎