How to reduce your nonprofit website's carbon footprint
A low-carbon website isn't just better for the planet. It's also a better experience for your visitors.
We've all landed on a website that's painful to use. It loads slowly, feels clunky to navigate, and has a bit too much going on. (Do we really need that fancy custom cursor or the slightly headache-inducing animation?)
Then there's the environmental side. The bigger and heavier your website is, with huge images, endless scripts, and tons of pages, the more energy it takes to load, transfer, and store all that information. Multiply that by every visitor, and your homepage could be using far more energy than you'd ever guess. For mission-driven organizations, especially those focused on climate, health, or community well-being, that's worth paying attention to.
We'll be the first to admit our approach has changed over time. We used to design with all the bells and whistles. They are fun, but they're also heavy and often unnecessary. Still, we don't believe a cleaner, more energy-efficient website means sacrificing design or story. Quite the opposite. A lighter site means people actually stick around long enough to see what you're sharing. It makes your website stronger, friendlier, and more future-proof.
If cleaning up your site feels daunting, here's the step-by-step process we followed on our own.
Step 1: Measure your footprint
Before you change anything, find out where you stand. Free tools like the Website Carbon Calculator estimate how much carbon each visit to your site produces and how it compares with other websites.
We ran our first test in May 2024, and honestly, it wasn't great. For a design studio whose mission is to help make the world a better place, it felt like a gut punch. We weren't following through in all the ways we thought we were. But we gave ourselves some grace. We didn't know better then, but now we did, and we had to do something about it.
Record your starting number so you can track your progress as you make changes.
Step 2: Declutter your content
This is the most important step for a healthy site. Like spring cleaning, it can feel like a lot at first, but it's also the easiest place to start. We found that after our first deep clean, managing the site became much easier, too.
Remove redundant pages. Too many pages can slow down your site and confuse visitors. It's tempting to repeat key information on every page just in case someone misses it, but resist the urge. Fewer, more focused pages make it easier for people to find what they need. Bonus: fewer pages to maintain.
Archive or repurpose old content. If you have blog posts or news updates that are more than two years old and gathering dust, it's time to clean house. Rather than simply deleting them, consider refreshing the best ones: update the information, polish the writing, and republish. It's a smart way to boost SEO, keep your site current, and get more mileage from work you've already done.
Fix broken links. Broken links frustrate visitors, chip away at your credibility, and can hurt your search rankings. Check for them regularly with a free tool like Broken Link Checker or Dead Link Checker. Just enter your URL, review the report, and fix what you find.
Step 3: Adopt sustainable design practices
Once the easy decluttering is done, these changes can reduce your footprint even further. They take a bit more time, and sometimes a designer or developer (hey, we can help!), but they make a big difference.
Shrink your images. As designers, we know how important crisp images are. But large images are one of the biggest culprits behind slow websites. Aim to keep most images under 200KB. Before uploading, run each one through a compression tool like TinyJPG, Squoosh, or ShortPixel to reduce the file size without visible quality loss. Modern formats like WebP and AVIF are even more efficient. You really can have both beautiful images and fast load times.
Choose colors thoughtfully. Color affects both energy use and readability. On OLED screens, which are common on phones, darker pixels use less power, so darker designs or a dark-mode option can save energy. On many laptop and desktop screens, color makes little difference to energy use. Whatever palette you choose, prioritize strong contrast between text and background. It makes your site easier to read for everyone, including people with low vision.
Keep layouts simple. Carousels, scrolling effects, and animations can add intrigue, but they also add weight. Use them sparingly, ideally no more than one per page, so they stay eye-catching without bogging down your site.
Trim your code. The leaner your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML, the faster and lighter your site. Ask whether each piece of custom code is truly necessary. If you use a site builder, could the styling be done in the editor instead? Could that fancy animation go? A skilled developer can often keep the effects you love while using far less code.
Step 4: Try more advanced approaches
If you want to push your numbers down even further, consider these:
Use caching. Caching helps your site load faster for returning visitors by reusing stored data instead of downloading everything again. It also eases the load on your server. Many site builders, including Squarespace, handle caching and content delivery automatically. You can still help by enabling lazy loading (so images load only when visitors scroll to them) and compressing images before upload.
Block unwanted crawlers. Not all bots are helpful. Some crawl sites aggressively, scrape content, or eat up bandwidth, and some AI companies use bots to collect website content for training. You can ask unwanted crawlers to stay away by setting rules in your robots.txt file, or use security tools that monitor bot traffic. It's not foolproof, since the worst bots ignore the rules, but it helps protect your content and lighten your server load.
Choose a green web host. Look for a hosting provider powered by renewable energy. It's one of the simplest switches with a real impact. The Green Web Foundation offers a free tool to check whether your site runs on green energy.
Step 5: Audit your site regularly
Just like your home, your website needs ongoing care. Every few months, do a quick sweep: remove outdated posts, fix broken links, delete unused media files, and rerun your carbon test. Once you've done the heavy lifting and built better habits, it's just a matter of a little tidying here and there.
Our results
When we ran our latest test in April 2025, it was such a relief to finally see a number that felt good: under 0.92 grams of CO2 per visit. That's lower than anything we achieved back when our site was packed with fancy integrations. And we don't feel like we sacrificed design at all. We just learned to make it better.
Helpful tools
Every small change adds up
We're committed to making our little corner of the internet as low-impact and welcoming as we can. And honestly, watching your site load lightning-fast while knowing you're making a positive impact? Pretty satisfying.
If you're curious or need help getting started, we're always happy to share what we've learned. We can help you adopt more sustainable practices, clean up your current site, or build a fresh website that checks all these boxes from day one.
At Sereth Design, we help nonprofits and impact-driven organizations build brands and websites that move people to act. See how we've done it in our case studies or start a conversation about your organization's next chapter.
