Why We’re Rethinking Low-Carbon Websites
Over the past few years, I’ve been on a journey to build digital products that tread more lightly on the planet. Along the way, I’ve learned a lot—especially about what works in practice, and where ideals can run up against reality.
One of the biggest things I’ve come to realise is this: good web design should automatically be low-carbon. Clean code, minimal bloat, efficient structure, optimised content—these are the hallmarks of good digital work, and they naturally lead to smaller file sizes, faster loading times, and lower energy use.
But I’m no longer going to lead with “low-carbon websites” as the headline offer. And here’s why.
Adding Just One Image Can Tank Your Carbon Score
The second you add an image to a page, your carbon score drops. But images can be essential for most companies to tell their story, showcase their work, and show what they do!
You can spend hours on lean, beautiful code and release a website with a low carbon score. But the moment a client wants to add a picture to their site, their score is compromised. That’s not fair to clients, and it doesn’t reflect the value of the work behind the scenes. I don’t want to set people—or myself—up for failure by promising something that can’t be maintained realistically. We did a wonderful job on a low carbon site for Lamlash Cruises, but their score still only reads “Cleaner than 49% of pages tested” because of course they want to show nice pictures of their cruise locations! Prior to that it was recording a score of “Cleaner than 92% of pages tested” which is undoubtedly more impressive sounding.
The Hidden Carbon of Development Time
There’s another factor: the actual development process. To make a truly low-carbon site, you often need to hand-code and fine-tune every element to the nth degree. And that takes time—time spent sitting at a machine, with screens on, sending files across networks, uploading to repositories. All of that adds to the digital carbon footprint too.
So even if I were to pour in the extra hours needed to build an ultra-light site, the carbon saved on the final product might be offset—or even outweighed —by the emissions generated during its creation. Especially for smaller or medium-sized clients, that equation starts to look a bit skewed and actually not worth it in terms of their investment and mine.
A Real-World Example
A great example of this is the Dunnet Bay Distillers website—a long-term client and one of my favourite builds. It was a highly visual, beautifully designed site selling luxury lifestyle products. Naturally, it needed stunning imagery throughout to reflect the brand and its offering —this wasn’t a site that could survive on stripped-back graphics or SVGs alone.
One of the last projects which I undertook for this client, was to reduce the carbon load for the Dunnet Bay Distillers website.
If you ran it through a carbon calculator, it would only ever score as “good”—but that wouldn’t reflect the huge amount of work we did to optimise it behind the scenes. We carried out a full review, streamlined the structure, optimised every asset, and reduced the site’s carbon emissions by around 40%.
The outcome? A fast, lean, responsive site that loaded beautifully across all devices and worked like a dream on slow networks. It was stunning to look at, but also much easier to use and maintain. All of those benefits were byproducts of taking low-carbon principles seriously, but you’d never know it from the score alone.
A New Approach
From now on, I’m pivoting slightly. As always, I’ll still be baking low-carbon principles into everything I build. That means:
Streamlined, high-performance websites
Clean code and minimal file sizes
Great UX on slow connections or older devices
Hosting on green servers
Tree planting for every project to offset ongoing digital carbon use
But I won’t be pushing the “low-carbon” badge as the first and foremost message. Because while I’m still 100% aligned with the values behind it, I’m choosing to focus on achievable, sustainable digital practices that empower clients, rather than constrain them.
Of course, for clients for whom low-carbon development is absolutely key, they can rest assured that these principles are baked into the design process—and if they’d like a more targeted low-carbon approach, I’m always happy to build that in and report back on the impact.
Still Green. Just Grown.
This shift doesn’t mean I care less about the environment. Quite the opposite—I care enough to be honest about what’s workable and feasible. And as I grow and evolve, so do the ways I bring my values into my work.
Other new developments…
There have been some exciting changes behind the scenes lately, including a project I’ve been deep in for the past six months—which I’ll be sharing more about soon.
In the meantime, I just wanted to be transparent about this little shift as you will start to see a change in the content on our website in the coming weeks.
