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Carbon Conscious Website Design, Where Performance Meets Sustainability
As businesses embrace ever more eco-conscious practices, the environmental impact of website design is under increasing scrutiny. At MAJOR, we’ve jumped headfirst into this brave new world, taking on the strict carbon criteria of the Eco-Friendly Web Alliance (EFWA) accreditation. To gain accreditation your average webpage should give off less than 0.65g of carbon per view.
No longer is website design just about aesthetics or mobile responsiveness—today, brands must put their websites on an eco-friendly diet that extends their focus to sustainability, aiming to reduce their carbon footprint while delivering performance-efficient digital experiences.
Why Carbon Matters in Web Design
The web was never meant to be an energy-sapping, planet-destroying machine, but as websites have grown more interactive and loaded up with fancy features, their environmental costs have skyrocketed.
Every little thing on a webpage—images, fonts, scripts—comes with its own energy bill. That energy comes from the data it takes to transmit those elements, the servers running overtime, and the devices accessing it all. When you’ve got thousands or even millions of visitors, the impact of those seemingly small design choices starts to look a lot less harmless.
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Taking this carbon conscious mindset, shifts the focus from just loading speeds or bandwidth to the wider issue of our collective carbon responsibility.
Before We Were Carbon-Crazy
Before anyone was talking about carbon-conscious web design, we had something called ‘page-size budgets’ at MAJOR. These collectively agreed numbers kept design and development teams in check, acting as the referee in conversations about why the client can’t have every last bell and whistle. It made sure people got creative within their limits. You want that fancy feature? Sure, but it’s going to cost you elsewhere in the design.
Anyway, this kind of measured thinking hasn’t gone away, its evolved—and now, it’s got a planet-sized mission attached to it.
Setting a Carbon Budget
Just as we once used size budgets to balance design with performance, we now adopt carbon budgets to achieve low-carbon web solutions. A carbon budget still sets a fixed limit on page size, which in turn influences design choices from the outset. However, the concept has evolved: it’s not just about kilobytes anymore—it’s about energy consumption, data transfer, and how the decisions we are making are contributing to a globally sustainable web.
Want that shiny, hi-res animated hero image? Go ahead. But it’s going to chew up a big slice of your carbon budget. A chunky 100KB image might mean you’ve got to strip back on the fonts or bin a few external scripts. It’s the old balancing act, except this time we’re trying to reduce digital waste and create greener, sleeker websites.
Weighing Design Choices with Carbon in Mind
What used to be straightforward design decisions are now intricately tied to sustainability. Here are a few key considerations for carbon-conscious design without sacrificing user experience:
Image Optimisation: Use responsive images and next-gen formats (like WebP), which can trim media file sizes by up to 30% without losing quality. Lazy-loading also ensures that images are only downloaded when necessary, conserving energy.
Fonts and Scripts: While custom fonts and scripts are integral to many brand identities, they can significantly increase the carbon load. Subset fonts to load only the characters required, or consider system fonts where feasible. Variable fonts are really useful too.
Content Prioritisation: Reducing the number of requests to external resources and cutting down on third-party scripts can minimise page size. Every request has a carbon cost, and streamlining these not only improves performance but also reduces the environmental burden.
Efficiency Through Simplicity: Minimalism is no longer just an aesthetic trend; it’s your sustainability strategy. Animations, video backgrounds, dynamic content—ask yourself, is it worth the hit?
Headless and Composable Architectures: Using a headless CMS and composable architecture allows for lean, efficient websites that reduce the need for constant server calls. By decoupling the front and back ends, headless systems reduce server loads and deliver content more efficiently, slashing your carbon impact across multiple channels.
Performance as a Collaborative Effort
Carbon-conscious design isn’t just the responsibility of the developer, nor does it fall solely on the UX or visual design teams. It’s a shared goal that starts at the very conception of a project. At MAJOR, we ensure tight collaboration between UX, design, and development teams, working together to optimise early prototypes with performance and sustainability in mind. We create small, quick iterations and run carbon audits throughout the design and development process.
A carbon budget transforms project conversations. It’s no longer about compromising on creativity; it’s about discovering innovative ways to marry striking design with responsible web practices. For example, should we use a custom animation? If so, where can we reduce energy consumption elsewhere to maintain the carbon budget?
Why Carbon-Conscious Web Design is Non-Negotiable
The internet isn't exactly shrinking anytime soon! As the internet’s thirst for energy rises, creating sustainable websites is no longer optional. It’s an absolute must. Today’s websites need to be ready for the future, not just in terms of tech but in terms of environmental impact. By sticking to carbon-conscious principles, we’re not only building better websites—we’re setting a standard for the rest of the industry to follow.
At MAJOR, we’re all in. We’ve embraced the EFWA’s guidelines, and every project we take on meets their accreditation standards. We believe in creating responsive, high-performance websites, but we’re equally passionate about ensuring those sites contribute to a greener future.
Final Thoughts
The world of web design is always changing, and it’s no longer just about making sites that look good on a phone. With performance and sustainability now tightly interwoven, carbon-conscious web design is here to stay. Embracing efficient, minimal, and scalable designs ensures the web remains not only accessible and beautiful but sustainable too.
The real magic of setting carbon budgets is that it doesn’t just help the planet—it sparks performance-related conversations that benefit everyone. When everyone’s working together towards the same goal from day one, performance becomes a shared priority, not just something developers fret over at the end.
With the right design choices, we can make visually stunning, high-performing websites without costing the earth.
Find out more about the awesome work of EFWA here
