Table of Contents
A sustainable WordPress website helps your business run a greener, cleaner online presence. In the current climate, it’s the responsibility of any founder, owner or manager to take CO2 emissions seriously.
Digital assets, such as your website, produce carbon emissions every time someone loads one of your pages. Although it’s often overlooked, the vast amount of power that’s required to sustain our online lives is colossal.
Thankfully (yup, it’s not all doom and gloom), there are several easy ways we can address the situation. Not fully, of course, but drastically minimising our impact is a solid starting point.
Available for Hire
- Freelance Services
- WordPress Websites
- Speed Optimisation
- Local SEO Campaigns
- WordPress Consultation
- Website Maintenance
Sustainable WordPress Websites
Having maintained the Clearcut Derby website for the last eleven years, I’ve continually obsessed over loading times and, more recently, our Website Carbon Calculator Score.
The homepage is currently sitting at an A+ score that’s cleaner than 94% of all web pages globally. This blog post also has the same score.
As a result, I’ve developed seven key areas that will all contribute towards an eco-friendly WordPress website that produces significantly less carbon.
Throughout the article, I’ve also got plenty of expert tips and advice from WordPress folks working in the sustainability space. I’ve included links to their websites, for further reading or info.
1. Green Web Hosting
Firstly, let’s take a look at the foundation of everything we’re about to cover, your web host. Most WordPress hosting companies these days use green, renewable energy.
With that said, a few, including wordpress.com, are still using bog-standard energy. Therefore, the first area to tick off is choosing your web host wisely.
Not all hosting is created equal. Providers like GreenGeeks run on renewable energy. That’s a simple switch with a real impact.
Warren Laine-Naida – Author of A Book About Climate-Friendly Web Design
You can test your current website over on the Green Web Foundation website. This will quickly and easily let you know if your site runs on renewable energy or not.
Furthermore, you’ll also find a handy list of green web hosts in your country, if needed. Do plenty of research, and if you can find a host that includes added performance settings, even better. More on this in step 3.
Note: If a web host uses something like Cloudflare’s CDN, the test results will only be based on Cloudflare. Always check that the web host themselves are listed on the Green Web Foundation.
2. WordPress Block Themes & Editor
Secondly, and equally as important as using the right web host, is choosing your WordPress theme. You’ll also need to consider how you’ll build your site.
For example, using the built-in block editor instead of a page builder such as Divi or Elementor. Generally speaking, if you’re focused on making your WordPress website as sustainable as possible, page builders will only hold you back.
This is because of the extra code and bloat that they layer on top of WordPress. Conversely, using the block editor means zero extra code and zero extra bloat. Happy days!
When it comes to choosing your theme, a block theme such as Twenty Twenty-Five or Ollie would be my recommendation. Alternatively, if you’re not quite ready to commit to a block theme, take a look at something like Kadence.
As long as your chosen theme works with the block editor, which all of the above do, you’re onto a winner.
WordPress, unlike many proprietary CMS systems, lets developers organize the content so that there’s a single point of entry. Less database queries = less server tax
Tony Ciccarone – 3tone Digital
3. Caching, Performance & Minification
Next up, we need a solid set of performance tools that will help your website load as quickly as possible. Additionally, these processes make your site more efficient and streamlined. This, of course, means less energy consumption.
For WordPress, there are approximately a gazillion caching and performance options, which is part of the reason it’s so confusing.
Many of the sites I help out with have had several performance plugins installed. Maybe in the hope that it will make the website three times faster. Spoiler alert – It doesn’t.
Proper sized images (reduces client CPU decoding), and caching plugins since you prevent making a server doing the same work over and over again. I think many people forget caching actually has a positive effect on power.
Lucas Rolff – PerfGrid
A common (not to mention extremely effective) paid solution is WP Rocket. It’s popular because it’s easy to set up and handles everything from caching to image optimisation and lazy loading to minifying CSS and JavaScript.
Alternatively, you could possibly get by with a free caching plugin such as WP Fastest Cache, WP Super Cache, or W3 Total Cache.
My personal recommendation would be to sidestep all of the above and instead use a green web host that includes all of the settings that you’d find in WP Rocket. 20i is a prime example, with its built-in performance and optimisation tools.
4. Optimise Images & Font Files
Images and video are usually the biggest resources on a web page. If your primary goal is to build a sustainable WordPress website, video is probably not going to be an option.
As images are usually a necessity, we need to ensure they’re optimised to speed your site up, instead of slowing it down. Use the correct size wherever possible and export your files as WebP or AVIF.
Once you’ve exported an image from your editing software, we can still further reduce its overall file size. Lob it into TinyPNG (works with any image file type) to shave between half and three-quarters of the file size off.
Now that your images are optimised, let’s take a look at your font files. Keep these to a minimum. It’s unlikely you need every weight of your chosen fonts, either.
When you download files from somewhere like Google Fonts, you’ll have a set of .ttf files. By converting them to WOFF2, you’ll quickly be able to reduce the file size by around a third.
For this, you can’t go wrong with the TTF to WOFF2 tool by CloudConvert, which is completely free.
There’s a hidden advantage to sustainable websites that many overlook, and that is it can have a positive impact on your business’ bottom line too. Simply put websites which load faster convert better.
Greg Findley – mantra.co.uk
5. A Mindful Design & Build Process
A sustainable WordPress website relies on designing and building mindfully. Question everything. What purpose does every aspect of your page serve?
More often than not, we can clean up a page to remove unnecessary elements without negatively affecting the user experience or conversion rates.
This process comes under the broader term of sustainable web design. It’s well worth diving into resources such as sustainablewebdesign.org or grabbing a copy of the Sustainable Web Design book by Tom Greenwood.
I use WordPress for my sustainable web design projects because it is the most strategic platform for creating a real, positive impact on the internet. My approach is simple: build websites that are lightweight, fast, and consume as little energy as possible. WordPress gives me full control to achieve this. I carefully choose resource-efficient themes and plugins, optimize every image to reduce its file size, and host the sites on servers that run on renewable energy.
Why is this so important? Because WordPress powers over 45% of the entire web. Every site we make more efficient is not an isolated achievement; it’s a direct contribution to reducing the digital carbon footprint on a global scale. By applying sustainable practices on the world’s largest platform, we not only deliver a superior and faster product to our clients, but we also take on the responsibility of building a cleaner, healthier internet for everyone. It’s the most effective way to turn every project into an agent of change.
Catalina Zapata – Sustainable Web Designer – lawebverde.com
6. Plugin Minimalism
Get your cleaning gloves out. It’s time to get all Marie Kondo on your websites ass.
Honestly, I can’t handle the chaos and carnage of most of the WordPress dashboards I see, so I’m on a mission to help change that. This starts with refining and reducing your plugin stack.
Admittedly, different types of businesses or websites will have their own unique requirements. But it’s still extremely common to see way more plugins installed than the amount required for the site to function.
Ask yourself: do I really need that carousel or pop-up? Every plugin adds weight and complexity. Go lean. WordPress works just fine with just a handful of well-coded plugins. FYI most of my websites use just five plugins.
7. Stay Accountable
Lastly, it’s important to realise that none of us will get this 100% right. Designing and building sustainable WordPress websites is an ever-evolving process.
While we’d all love to hit the cleaner than 100% of all web pages globally mark on the Website Carbon Calculator, it’s rarely achievable.
Instead, we can strive for the best possible results with our current knowledge and experience. To stay accountable as well as demonstrate your website’s green credentials, you may want to include the Website Carbon badge in the footer of your site.
This provides a constant reminder that no matter how well we’ve optimised WordPress, our web pages are still producing carbon each time they’re loaded.
The badge is also an easy way to keep tabs on how additional content is affecting your pages. It’s super-easy to add wherever you’d like it displayed. Just add a Custom HTML block and plonk this inside it:
<div id="wcb" class="carbonbadge"></div>
<script src="https://unpkg.com/website-carbon-badges@1.1.3/b.min.js" defer></script>
There was this project from a CloudFest hackathon a couple of years back, that was an attempt to create a canonical plugin that lowers the energy consumption of websites.
The plugin was initially focused on reducing recurring outgoing HTTP requests which can be a source of needless energy and bandwidth usage.
Leonidas Milosis, developer at Yoast sharing details of the Eco-Mode Plugin
Sustainable WordPress Websites – Conclusion
Building and maintaining sustainable WordPress websites is an ongoing process. The rabbit hole goes pretty deep, but the seven steps addressed here are likely to have the most impact to start with.
A huge thank you to all of the folks who contributed their ideas and expertise to this article. It’s reassuring to see so many people taking the sustainability of their online presence seriously.
Over to you! Apply these processes to your WordPress site for a drastically improved website carbon score. Test, tweak, learn, improve. The areas to initially look at are:
- Green Web Hosting
- WordPress Block Themes & Editor
- Caching, Performance & Minification
- Optimise Images & Font Files
- A Mindful Design & Build Process
- Plugin Minimalism
- Stay Accountable
Thanks for stopping by…
Ayup! My name’s Mike Hindle. I’m a WordPress sustainability professional with eleven years of experience and the owner here at Clearcut Derby.
I specialise in low-carbon websites that achieve maximum online presence with minimal environmental impact. If I had to be an animal, I’d be an elephant.