Most conversations about website speed focus entirely on customers, and fair enough, since a slow site loses you sales before anyone’s even seen what you’re offering.
There’s a second reason to care about it that gets talked about far less, and it’s worth knowing, because it turns out the fix for one problem is almost always the fix for the other.
The bit nobody mentions
The internet isn’t the weightless, invisible thing it sometimes feels like. Every image that loads, every video that autoplays, and every line of unnecessary code your site drags along with it takes real electricity to send, store, and display, multiplied across every visitor who lands on your page. Add that up across the whole internet, and the numbers get surprisingly large, with online activity now producing a share of global emissions on a similar scale to the aviation industry.
That’s not a reason to feel guilty about having a website, it’s a reason to build a leaner one. A site that’s been trimmed of the images it doesn’t need, the plugins it never uses, and the code left over from a redesign three years ago isn’t just faster for your customer, it’s doing less damage while it gets there.
Why the fixes overlap almost completely
This is the part worth remembering: nearly every change that makes your site faster also makes it lighter on energy, so you’re rarely choosing between the two.
Smaller, better-compressed images: A photo straight off a modern phone can run to several megabytes without you ever noticing, since the camera’s built to capture detail, not to think about how the file will be used afterwards. On a web page, that same photo usually only needs a fraction of that size to look sharp, and running it through a compression tool before it goes anywhere near your site can shrink it dramatically with no visible drop in quality. The file format matters too, since newer formats like WebP do the same job as an old-style JPEG at a much smaller size, and most website platforms can handle them without any extra fuss.
Fewer autoplaying videos, and lighter ones where you keep them: A video that starts playing the moment someone lands on your page is pulling data before they’ve decided they even want to watch it, and that’s true whether they end up watching or scrolling straight past. Letting visitors press play themselves solves most of the problem on its own, and for any video you do keep, using a proper video hosting service rather than embedding a huge file directly onto your page usually loads faster and costs less in the background too.
Less unused code: Every plugin, font, and feature added to a website over the years tends to stick around long after anyone stopped needing it, loading in the background on every single visit whether it’s doing anything useful or not. A font you switched away from two redesigns ago, a plugin installed for a competition that ended in 2023, or a chunk of tracking code nobody remembers adding, all of it adds weight your visitors are paying for in loading time, even if you’ve long forgotten it’s there. Having someone go through your site every so often and clear out what’s no longer earning its place is one of the simplest ways to keep it running light.
Hosting that runs on renewable energy: This is the one most business owners never think about, since hosting happens somewhere out of sight, but it’s worth asking your host directly whether they run on renewable power, and how efficient their data centre actually is. Our hosting solution runs on 100% renewable energy through one of the most efficient data centres in the UK, and it’s the kind of thing worth checking wherever you host, since it costs a provider nothing to tell you the answer.
Where to check your own site
You don’t need to take anyone’s word for any of this, since there are free tools that’ll check it for you directly.
The Green Web Foundation answers the simplest question first: is your hosting provider actually running on green energy, or just saying so. Put your web address in, and it checks against a verified database rather than relying on a claim made on a hosting company’s own website.
Website Carbon Calculator goes further, looking at your whole page, images, code, and everything else, and estimating how much CO2 a single visit produces, before giving you a rating to compare against other sites.
Digital Beacon is worth trying once you know you’ve got a problem and want to know exactly where it’s coming from, since it breaks your page down piece by piece, images, scripts, fonts, and shows which ones are adding the most weight.
A sensible thing to do either way
You don’t need to be running an environmental campaign to want a faster website, and you don’t need to be chasing a speed score to care about your footprint. The two happen to point in exactly the same direction, so tidying up your site for one reason gets you the other for free, and it’s the kind of change that’s becoming a basic expectation rather than a nice extra.
If you’d like a hand finding out how heavy your current site is, and where the easy wins are, we’re happy to take a look.