Web Sustainability: Frequently Asked Questions

Here are answers to the most frequently asked questions about web sustainability, including what it is, who it affects, and how to meaningfully address it in your organization. 

Web sustainability has seen a slow rise over the past few years. However, it is also a commonly misunderstood topic. This can lead to greenwashing, misinformation, and the perception that sustainability is not important to an organization.

Below, we answer top web sustainability questions based on thousands of conversations we’ve had about with clients, fellow practitioners, sustainability professionals, and others on the topic. 

1. What is web sustainability?

The World Wide Web Consortium defines web sustainability as follows:

Web sustainability is the ambition to design, develop, and operate digital products and services such that they meet the needs of the present while ensuring future generations can meet their own needs. 

— Sustainable Web Interest Group, World Wide Web Consortium

2. Why is web sustainability important? 

Here are just a few of many reasons why web sustainability is important:

• Electricity use: Information and communication technologies (ICT) represent 4% of global electricity use with corresponding greenhouse gas emissions. Data centers represent 1.5% of this, a number which is expected to double by 2030. AI systems alone represent nearly half of total data center power consumption.
• Water: Also, AI is thirsty. Large data centers can use up to five million gallons of water per day. Not all of this water can be reused.
• Waste: Data centers—and the tech sector in general—contribute to the vast proliferation of e-waste, which is the world’s fastest-growing waste stream. Global e-waste is estimated to surpass 60-65 million metric tons.
• People: The web also poses potential ethics, safety, security, privacy, accessibility, misinformation, and digital literacy threats which can directly undermine social well-being as well as the very fabric of society.
• Ubiquitous web: Digital products and services, including those enabled by AI, use the web as a delivery mechanism.

3. What are the benefits of web sustainability? 

Common web sustainability benefits include: 

• Usability: Sustainable web solutions are typically more performant across a wider range of platforms and devices, providing a better user experience.
• Accessibility: Sustainability and accessibility naturally complement one another. Digital products and services that prioritize both offer better experiences for the nearly one billion people worldwide who identify as having a physical or cognitive disability. This also includes streamlined access to information in the form of better search results and, increasingly, AI overviews. 
• Energy: More sustainable web solutions can result in lower energy consumption and reduced greenhouse gas emissions across scopes 1, 2, and 3.
• Costs: Incorporating web sustainability principles into your digital products and services can potentially lower costs related to reduced data collection, transfer, and storage.

4. How should I get started with web sustainability?

Most organizations start by understanding the potential sustainability challenges with their current tech stack and digital marketing or IT tools. 

A digital life cycle assessment will give you the most comprehensive roadmap. However, because those are time- and resource-intensive, it is often more useful to identify low-hanging fruit by auditing your most important digital properties. 

A tool like Digital Beacon, Footsprint, or our own Ecograder can help with this.  

5. Isn’t web sustainability just about performance?

There’s a common misconception that web sustainability is really web performance wrapped in a new name. This simply isn’t true. 

While fast-loading, responsive pages play a role in web sustainability and performance, the former represents a much broader, more holistic approach to the ecological, social, and economic impacts of an organization’s web-based products and services.

6. Who should pay attention to web sustainability?

All organizations should pay attention to and prioritize web sustainability, as it’s a critical component of a holistic and more comprehensive impact strategy. However, web sustainability will be more relevant to some organizations than others.

To that end, W3C’s Web Sustainability Guidelines offer specific guidance for:

• Business and product leaders, such as product managers, the c-suite, and marketing teams
• UX design teams, including content strategists, experience designers, and so on
• Front- and back-end web developers
• IT managers in charge of hosting and infrastructure

If your organization extensively utilizes digital products and services—whether by creating and managing them or through subscribing to third-party offerings—you should consider prioritizing web sustainability.  

7. I’m a marketer. Do I need to care about web sustainability?

As marketing often drives consumption across an organization’s value chain, marketers especially should be keenly aware of the impact of their work. For digital marketers, web sustainability is especially relevant to the campaigns you plan and execute as well as your digital supply chain. 

8. What’s the difference between web sustainability and digital sustainability?

Web sustainability—which is a key part of digital sustainability—specifically focuses on websites, features, and content delivered via the web. Digital sustainability broadens this scope to include the entire digital ecosystem, from data centers, hardware, and software to long-term resilience and viability of a system’s various components alongside the people who depend on system availability.

However, because sustainability initiatives are often interdisciplinary and interdependent, it is not uncommon for many web-based projects to include elements of each. This is especially true when it comes to tracking, measuring, and mitigating emissions across scopes 1, 2, and 3. 

9. Will web sustainability help me reduce emissions?

Yes. Everything on the web requires electricity to run. Much of this electricity is still produced from fossil fuel sources. Therefore, reducing energy use can directly correlate to emissions reductions.

However, minimizing data transfer by reducing the size of a website or individual page—a common sustainable web design practice—is only one small part of a more comprehensive and holistic web sustainability strategy. Focusing only on emissions reduction—commonly referred to as carbon tunnel vision—misses other important web sustainability strategies, including:

• Hardware: Poorly designed software more rapidly burns out hardware, which contributes to our growing global e-waste problem.
• Infrastructure: Similarly, looking beyond green hosting to include larger digital supply chains will help an organization transition their entire digital infrastructure toward more sustainable solutions, not just web hosting.
• Digital inequality: What’s more, ineffective data governance can cause privacy and security issues while also contributing to data inequality. Given the rapidly changing legal environment, this puts organizations at risk.
• Digital resilience: Finally, neglecting good digital governance can undermine an organization’s long-term resilience.

10. How can I incorporate web sustainability into the reporting my organization already does?

If your company produces impact reports on at least an annual basis, dedicate a section in each report to your web and digital sustainability efforts alongside other more traditional sustainability metrics. This will help you avoid greenwashing (more on this below) and tell a better sustainability story.

If you need to meet specific regulatory requirements, like Europe’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive or California’s climate disclosure laws, see #13 below.

11. How can I spot digital greenwashing? 

Look for ‘green’ digital claims that aren’t backed up with real data or clear organizational sustainability commitments, statements, public-facing policies, and so on. For example, it’s great for a company to choose a green web host. However, that act in and of itself doesn’t make the company—or its website, for that matter—’green’. 

To combat greenwashing and reduce risk, companies should state their goals clearly and transparently with regular progress reports to help people better understand where they are on a sustainability journey (and where they plan to go).  

12. Where does AI fit into web sustainability? 

Most AI applications are delivered via the web, so it is critical to consider sustainability in AI-related decision-making. Many are also delivered through third-party providers, making them especially relevant to supply chain and scope 3 emissions issues. 

With that said, as of this writing, third-party provider data gaps and a significant lack of tooling can undermine an organization’s ability to track, measure, and improve the environmental impact of web products that utilize AI. However, this is changing quickly. 

13. Are there laws or regulations to govern web sustainability? What are my risks? 

Numerous laws, policies, directives, and standards related to web sustainability have been introduced around the world. This regulatory guidance exists in various states—development (draft), consultation, or awaiting approval in the jurisdictions where they are relevant.

Because of the constantly changing nature of this legislation, it is difficult to make any blanket assessment of organizational risk. We recommend that organizations stay on top of changes to legislation in their jurisdiction and industry developments. 

Also, this is not legal advice. 

14. How should I improve our sustainability efforts over time?

Web sustainability is not a one-and-done discipline. Good governance practices that incorporate sustainability strategies are more likely to help an organization track, measure, and improve web sustainability performance over time. 

Most digital marketers are already measuring campaign performance metrics over time so this process is already second nature to their work. If your organization doesn’t have a dedicated sustainability team, talking to the marketing department might be a good place to start. Or give us a shout. We’d be happy to help.

Creating Long-term Success

Hopefully, the questions above can help your organization answer its most pressing web sustainability questions and, if you haven’t already, get started on your own journey. 

Think we missed an important question that needs to be answered? Drop us a line and let us know.