Websites

You can read Supercool’s Cultural Website Sustainability Benchmark Report from July 2025 here. 

Internet use, emails and other digital tools are not carbon neutral. The internet relies on banks of servers with massive electricity needs for power and cooling. Minimising use is therefore an important way of reducing your environmental impact:

• Review the impact of your website. Change hosting and design can reduce the emissions it causes.

• Educate staff on best internet, email and social media practice.

There are three key questions to ask when assessing the emissions a website produces:

• Is the website hosted in a data centre that uses fossil fuel electricity, or renewables?

• How much content (in MB) is on there?

• How much data gets transferred when the web page opens?

• How many times are the website’s pages viewed by its visitors over time?

You can watch a webinar by Supercool about reducing your website’s carbon footprint here.

 To test the carbon emissions of your website, use a Website Carbon Tool. If your host’s servers aren’t powered by green energy, switch to more planet-friendly hosting options. The first step to reduce a website’s carbon emissions is to host it in a data centre which uses 100% renewable energy instead of fossil fuel electricity.

• Calculate your emissions with a tool such as Website Carbon

• Contact current technical and digital providers and ask for their environmental and energy reports and what they are doing to address their impacts.

The intensity of website carbon emissions relates to the number of visitors and the content they’re accessing. It’s particularly important that large organisations, with high numbers of website visitors, pay attention to their website emissions.

To further achieve carbon-reducing optimisation, the key is to make the content shared as light as possible – most commonly by compressing any images and videos that are displayed and making their file sizes smaller.

• The target threshold for the entire page of a normal business website should not need to be any larger than 1MB.

• For more ideas on reducing impact, see here.

Staff Digital Use

Encourage staff:

• To delete emails that won’t be needed again and prevent them being stored unnecessarily.

• To use phone instead of a laptop for quick Google searches, as it uses less energy.

• To unsubscribe from email newsletters and mailing lists that are no longer needed.

• To use Google Drive and Google Photos (or similar) for cloud storage.

Artifical Intelligence

Consider the energy use of AI tools, especially as they become increasingly used in the workplace. You may be interested in reading SustAIn, an online  magazine about sustaianble AI. If you are working on creating an AI Policy you may be interested in reading the Arts Council England case study here.

Tools

Tools for tracking your own website or digital impact:

The Green Web Foundation

Website Carbon

Further guidance can be found here:

Culture Hive

Julie’s Bicycle Report on Sustainability in the Age of Digitial Culture

Art Fund, THE HERDS and Manifesto’s new resource: Tech ‘Might’ Save Us: A Low Carbon Approach to your work online.

If you are an individual artist, you can access a free low-carbon website builder with Fast Familier.

With thanks to Katie Parry of Supercool for input into this Toolkit page. 

You can read more here