What’s the single thing you would do to make a web service more sustainable these days?
From between 2018 and April 2025, I was an organiser of an online community called climateAction.tech. I’ve written about it a few times before on this blog.
In the community slack, someone who I respect asked a valid question:
I’d like to propose a little thought experiment: let’s say that you wanted to cut the carbon footprint of a digital service that you operate but only had time/budget to do one thing, where would you focus? I’m going to take a stab at answering this in the
but others can chime in.
For context, they work in a business selling what I consider domain names at the higher end of the market with a sustainability themed TLD (i.e. something like .green, or .earth and so on), where I’ve seen prices around the 60 USD mark for a regular domain.
This might be 2-4 times the cost of a typical .org, .net, or .com domain name, so it’s already something of a premium sustainability product relative to a ‘regular’ domain, but in the context of a website project, this cost is comparatively tiny.
The original poster started with the argument that using carbon free hosting was the recommendation he normally shares.
There was a fairly active thread with answers, and I realised that a) my answer might be useful outside the slack and b) sharing long blog post length answers in slack is usually a sign I should write a blog post and link to it, rather than dump a wall of text on other people.
With that in mind, I’ve reposted a lightly edited version of my answer below:
Off we go:
My answer
I ended up joining the Green Web Foundation because honestly, I felt that changing the underlying source of power was the most impactful change I could recommend for the most people to follow.
Even then, one thing I’ve learned over the last few years is that given the way web hosting markets are structured, and the way people buy websites, even making that decision isn’t one I can rely on expecting people to do, because sustainability is seen as much less important than allowing your incredibly expensive developers to be productive.
I think this helps explain why I’ve been getting more involved in policy because that can at least set new defaults.
If you can’t switch providers, or at least engage with a provider asking them to make a commitment in future, then I can understand the impulse to make changes to the design or configuration as $COMMENTER_1 says – that at least lets you do something.
If you’re not already a web developer though, it is a relatively expensive intervention – hiring a web developer to make your site more sustainable through front OR back end performance changes relies on you being able to:
dedicate loads of time to learning all the techniques to become one, or
hire a web developer with the required set of skills to apply them to your site, who are hard to find, and generally more expensive than developers who haven’t specialised like this
Both of these are hard to justify with their short term returns vs the other things you’re expected to do when sustainability isn’t your main job.
From a business point of view, they’re also more disruptive, as you now need to spend loads of social capital telling people outside of the web dev team to change how they work, or move to different software platforms, and tell them their work is now being judged against a new and unfamiliar metric that they don’t really understand or know how to challenge.
I’m saying this as a response to your thought experiment, and to say I agree with the guidance you’re sharing, particularly if the audience is interested enough to buy a nice $SUSTAINABILITY_TLD domain name, but might not be prepared to commission a full-on web site audit, digital sustainability consulting engagement or architectural review.
