What does a « low-carbon » website actually mean?

I was recently featured on lowwwcarbon.com for building a sustainable, energy-efficient website. But what does that really mean, and what’s the point? Let me break it down.

These days, building a website has never been easier with online tools, visual builders and ready-made themes… The downside is that we no longer control what’s happening under the hood. The code is often heavy and packed with unnecessary features, which leads to two big issues:

1. Slower loading pages
2. More requests sent to the server

Every request and every useless kilobyte consumes energy. For one site, the impact may seem tiny. But when you realise there are nearly 2 billion websites worldwide… every optimisation matters. If each site were just a bit more efficient, we’d save a massive amount of energy collectively.

So how do you reduce a website’s impact?

There’s no magic trick, just lots of simple best practices:

• Optimise images (right formats, compression, smart loading)
• Avoid heavy or unnecessary plugins
• Use custom code instead of generic themes
• Design with lightweight implementation in mind
• Limit external requests

A low-carbon website isn’t just one that pollutes less. It’s also faster, more accessible, nicer to use and often better ranked in search engines.

And what about hosting?

Even if a site is optimised, its hosting server has a direct impact. Some “green” hosting providers use renewable energy (often solar or wind) or offset their emissions. Hosting your site with a responsible provider reduces your footprint without changing anything in the design or content.nu.

How do you know if your site is energy-hungry?

Before talking optimisation, the easiest step is to measure your current impact. Here are two free tools that give you an initial estimate :

EcoIndex

This French tool analyses page weight, number of requests and code structure. It gives a grade from A to G, a score out of 100 and an estimate of energy consumption. It also highlights areas for improvement (images, scripts, unnecessary content, etc.).

Test your website on EcoIndex

WebsiteCarbon

This one takes a more visual approach. It calculates how much CO₂ is emitted per visit and compares your site to the global average. You can see, for example, how many trees would be needed to offset it or whether your site is “greener” than most others.

Test your website on WebsiteCarbon

These tests don’t replace a full audit, but they’re a solid starting point to understand where you stand. And if you want to go further, identify what could be improved or consider a more sustainable redesign, I can help you.

In short

A « low-carbon » website isn’t a style or a trend, it’s a way of building the web more responsibly, reducing resource usage without sacrificing the experience.

And if one day you want to improve your site or create a new one with someone reliable, who writes clean code and thinks about all this from day one, you know where to find me 😉