The environmental impact of digital technology is documented and growing. Web eco-design addresses this challenge through practices that reduce resource consumption — and which, in the majority of cases, also improve perceived performance.
What a website’s footprint represents
Every visit to a website consumes energy: on the server side to process the request and send resources, on the network side to transport them, on the user’s device side to display them.
This consumption is largely determined by the weight of loaded resources (images, scripts, fonts), rendering complexity and hosting configuration. Reducing this weight simultaneously reduces the environmental footprint and load time.
Concrete levers
Image optimisation is the lever with the best impact-to-effort ratio: using modern formats (WebP, AVIF), sizing images to their actual display size, and lazy-loading off-screen images.
Reducing third-party scripts — analytics, advertising, social widgets — also contributes significantly. These scripts, often added without evaluating their real cost, can represent a significant share of a page’s weight.
Green hosting
The choice of hosting provider impacts a site’s carbon footprint. Hosting providers that use renewable energy for their data centres allow this impact to be reduced structurally, independently of optimisations made to the site itself.