TL;DR: QEDweb design now builds environmentally friendly website solutions that load faster, use less energy and rank better, without sacrificing speed or function.
We cut our own site’s carbon per page view from 0.24g to 0.04g, and we do the same for clients.
The big cloud providers are cleaning up their act too, which is good news, but your website still has a footprint worth shrinking.
Most websites are quietly wasteful. Every page view burns a little energy, and across billions of visits a day that adds up to a real environmental cost. The good news is that a faster, leaner website is also a greener one, and it tends to rank better and convert more visitors while it is at it.
This is the story of how QED changed direction, what we have learned, and why an environmentally friendly website is one of the easier wins a small business can bank.
Why we changed direction to environmentally friendly website solutions
Over one Christmas, while everyone else was winding down, I was laid up in bed with pneumonia. It gave me time to think, and to lean into the Japanese idea of kaizen, which is all about small, continuous improvement.
The conclusion was simple. QED could build websites that were less damaging to the environment without giving up an ounce of speed or function. If anything, the two goals pull in the same direction. A site that wastes less energy is usually a site that loads faster, and that is better for your visitors and your search ranking.
So that is the direction we took, and we have not looked back.
Practising what we preach
It would be a bit rich to sell green websites while running a bloated one ourselves, so we started at home.
Our hosting was already strong. Our hosting company runs on renewable energy and has planted trees on our behalf to offset our footprint. But offsetting is the last step, not the first. The bigger win is using less energy in the first place, which means reducing the carbon created every time someone loads a page.
Over the course of a January we redesigned the QED site, tidied the code and trimmed the weight.
That is the bar we now build to. The next question, of course, is whether it works for clients as well as it does for us.
What it means for your business
We took over the management and hosting of Morgan-Huntley Associates’ website. By any sensible measure it was underperforming: slow, heavy and burning more energy than it needed to.
One change made the biggest difference. By moving the site onto efficient green hosting and trimming the worst of the bloat, we cut the carbon per page view dramatically and lifted the site’s Google Lighthouse performance score by more than half. A faster site is a better experience for visitors, and Google rewards that with stronger rankings, so the environmental win and the commercial win arrive together.
You can read the full write-up on our client Morgan-Huntley Associates in our portfolio.
The big players are making real strides
It is easy to feel gloomy about the internet’s footprint, and there are plenty of scary headlines about data centres and water use, especially as demand grows with artificial intelligence. But the picture is not all bad. The companies that run the world’s largest data centres have made serious public commitments, and several are well on the way to meeting them.
Each of the four big cloud providers has pledged to become water positive by 2030, meaning they aim to return more water to local communities than their data centres consume. Here is where they currently stand.
| Provider | 2030 water target | Latest reported progress | Standout move |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon (AWS) | Water positive | 75% there in 2025 | Returned 3 gallons for every 4 used; water efficiency more than doubled since 2021 |
| Water positive | 7bn+ gallons replenished, 2025 | Network on track to replenish 19bn+ gallons a year by 2030; over $500m committed to water infrastructure | |
| Microsoft | Water positive | Zero-water cooling on new builds | All builds from August 2024 use zero-water cooling designs |
| Meta | Water positive | Strategy set, December 2025 | New sites use dry and closed-loop cooling; Beaver Dam site to restore 100% of water used plus 570 acres of wetland |
That is genuine progress, and it is worth celebrating. But a word of caution is fair too.
The takeaway is encouraging without being naive. The infrastructure underneath the web is getting cleaner, but that does not let any individual website off the hook. The page someone loads on their phone still has a footprint, and that part is squarely within your control.
How QED builds a greener website
There is no single trick to it. A low-carbon website is the result of a series of sensible decisions, each one trimming a little waste.
- Green hosting. We host on renewable-powered infrastructure. Where the energy comes from is the single biggest lever, so it is the first thing we sort.
- Lightweight build. We optimise for speed and efficiency, which reduces server load and energy use. Faster pages and lower carbon are the same job done well.
- Lean design. We favour clean, code-efficient layouts over resource-heavy graphics and plugin sprawl. Every megabyte you do not send is energy you do not spend.
- Carbon reporting. We give clients a measurement and a link to their site’s carbon footprint, so the number is visible rather than hidden.
- Plain-English guidance. We explain the impact of common choices, from image sizes to autoplaying video, so you can keep the site lean after launch.
None of this is exotic. It is mostly good web development practice, applied with the footprint in mind. The pleasant surprise is how often the greenest option is also the fastest and the cheapest to run.
Why this is not a marketing gimmick
Plenty of agencies put a leaf on their homepage and call it sustainability. We have seen sustainability pages on agency sites whose own pages were producing several times the carbon of an average website. That is not a green credential, it is a sticker.
The difference is measurement. A website’s carbon footprint can be tested with free, public tools, and the number is hard to argue with. We test ours, we test our clients’, and we share the progress openly. If a claim cannot be measured, it is just a claim.
We also found kindred spirits in Design Declares, a growing group of designers and agencies treating the climate crisis as a design brief worth taking seriously. It is reassuring to know we are not shouting into the void.
Ready for a greener website?
A faster, greener website is better for the planet, better for your visitors and better for your Google ranking, and it usually costs less to run. That is a rare combination where doing the right thing and the smart thing are the same decision.
If you are curious how green your current site really is, we are happy to run a free carbon footprint check and show you where the easy wins are. And if you would like a site built lean from the ground up, take a look at our website design packages or just get in touch for a no-obligation chat.
Sources
- Amazon, Amazon’s data centres are 7x more water-efficient than the industry average (2025 progress: 75% towards water positive, 3 gallons returned for every 4 used).
- Amazon, How AWS uses recycled water in data centers (water efficiency more than doubled since 2021).
- ESG Dive, Google commits to replenish more water than it uses by 2030 (7bn+ gallons replenished in 2025; 19bn+ projected by 2030).
- Data Centre Magazine, Google’s data centre water use to turn net positive by 2030 ($500m+ committed to water infrastructure).
- AdwaitX, Why Meta’s water-positive plan could change data centers (Microsoft zero-water builds from August 2024; Meta Beaver Dam restoration).
- Latitude Media, Data center water use can be a ‘black box’ (site-level disclosure gaps; rising industry consumption).
