Earth Day was last week, but the question of whether our choices are helping or hurting the planet doesn’t take a day off, and that includes choices like how your website is built and who’s powering it.
There are three areas worth considering.
Site performance
Every time someone loads a slow, bloated page, it burns more power than it needed to. And now multiply that across every visitor, every day… That’s worth caring about on its own, but the good news is that a faster site also means a better experience for people on slower connections, and better performance in search rankings. You can check where you stand for free with Google’s PageSpeed Insights.
A few specific things that affect site speed:
- Make sure your photos are optimized for the web. Images should be no more than a few hundred kilobytes.
- Avoid making visitors download information as PDFs when a well-designed web page would do the job.
- Ask whether animations or videos, which are nearly always larger files than images, are actually necessary.
- If you’re more technical, consider options like browser caching and using lazy loading for images.
The sustainability of your hosting company
Your hosting company matters more than you might realize. If you picked your host years ago because it was cheap and someone’s nephew recommended it, you’re not alone! But it might be time for a second look.
Hosts vary a lot in whether they use renewable energy, run more efficient hardware, or offset their emissions; the ones that don’t are quietly drawing on fossil fuels every time your site loads.
There’s also something that doesn’t get talked about enough: data centers are disproportionately built in lower-income communities and communities of color, where residents have little say and absorb the costs: noise, heat, heavy water use, strain on local infrastructure. So when you’re evaluating a host, the questions worth asking aren’t just technical. Community accountability belongs on the checklist too.
Your use of AI
This one might be the most uncomfortable to sit with, especially for mission-driven organizations. AI tools are genuinely expensive in environmental terms. They use enormous amounts of water and energy, much of it from fossil fuels. Data centers land in the communities with the least power to push back. Researchers have projected AI centers’ emissions in 2035 to be roughly equal to Italy’s entire output.
I’m not saying never use AI. I used Claude for an editorial pass on this very Tip. But there’s a meaningful difference between using AI as an occasional tool and making it a routine part of your content production, especially for images and video, which often require several energy-intensive rounds before you get something usable. If your mission involves the environment or community equity, that gap between values and vendor choices is worth sitting with.
An Earth Friendly Website
Your website reflects your organization’s values in more ways than one. A performance audit, a closer look at your host, a more intentional approach to AI: none of it will fix the climate on its own. But these are exactly the kinds of small, considered choices that add up, and that your community would likely appreciate knowing you’ve given them thought.
Deep Dive
How to use Google PageSpeed Insights to test your website | Da Hawaii Website Guy
I mentioned Google’s PageSpeed Insights above as a starting point. This article is a clear, practical walkthrough of how to actually use it. It covers how to run a test, what the color-coded scores mean, how to interpret the Core Web Vitals metrics that Google uses in its search rankings, and how to read the Opportunities and Diagnostics sections to know what to fix first. A good next step for anyone who runs their score and then wonders what to do with the results.
Designing sustainable content | Button Events
A thoughtful look at how the content choices you make, for instance video vs. audio, audio vs. text, have real and measurable carbon costs. The article introduces a sustainable content calculator and frames sustainable content not as a sacrifice, but as good content practice: clear, concise, and user-centered. A useful read for anyone managing editorial decisions on a nonprofit website.
Best green web hosting services | Website Planet
A practical, independently tested comparison of green hosting providers, evaluating each on both environmental credentials and everyday hosting quality, so you’re not trading a clean conscience for a slow, unreliable site. Helpful starting point if you’re ready to evaluate your current host or make a switch.
Web sustainability guidelines (WSG) | W3C
The closest thing the web has to an official sustainability standard, developed by over 100 experts and published by the World Wide Web Consortium (the same body behind web accessibility guidelines). It covers 80+ guidelines across design, development, hosting, and business strategy. Dense reading, but the quick reference version makes it more approachable. It’s worth knowing it exists even if you only dip into the sections most relevant to your work.