What Is the Carbon Footprint of a Website?

A typical web page emits roughly 0.5–5 g CO₂ per view, so a website's carbon footprint is simply that per-view figure multiplied by your traffic — a site serving a million page views a year lands at ≈ 0.5–5 tonnes of CO₂. The exact number swings with page weight, how and where the site is hosted, and the devices your visitors use, so treat any single result as an order-of-magnitude estimate rather than a precise measurement.

Where a website's emissions come from

• Data centres. The servers that store and deliver your pages draw electricity around the clock, plus extra energy to keep the hardware cool.
• Network transfer. Every image, script, font and video crosses routers, cables and mobile networks that all burn power in transit.
• User devices. Phones, tablets and laptops spend their own energy downloading, rendering and displaying each page you send them.
• Traffic volume. A tiny per-view figure multiplied by millions of visits is what quietly turns grams into tonnes over a year.

How to estimate your site's footprint

To size your own footprint, multiply a realistic per-view figure by your annual page views — but first work out where your pages sit in that 0.5–5 g band. The biggest driver is page weight: heavy hero images, autoplaying video and uncached assets can push a single page well past 5 g, while a lean, well-cached page stays under 0.5 g. Hosting matters almost as much, since a server on a renewable-powered grid emits far less than a "dirty-grid" data centre running on fossil fuels. Rather than guess, drop your numbers into a free tool such as Evertreen's CO₂ calculator to get a defensible annual estimate before you change anything.

How to cut a website's carbon footprint

Once you know the rough figure, the fastest wins come from shrinking what you send. Compress and lazy-load images, strip out unused scripts and fonts, minify your code and cache aggressively so returning visitors re-download as little as possible. Choosing a host that runs on renewable energy cuts the data-centre share at a stroke, and a good CDN shortens the distance your data has to travel. In practice these steps can halve a page's footprint while also making it load faster, which tends to lift conversions and search rankings at the same time — a rare case where the greener option is also the more profitable one.

Offset the remainder with traceable trees

You will rarely reach zero on efficiency alone, so the honest final step is to offset the emissions you cannot yet design out. Evertreen lets you fund real reforestation with geolocated, traceable trees from £1.5 each, and you can plant trees as a one-off or on a recurring basis, with every tree mapped so you can show visitors exactly where their impact lands. For businesses, our API and Shopify integration build offsetting straight into a site or checkout, so you can neutralise emissions automatically per order or per visit rather than by hand. When you need audit-ready proof for ESG or customer reporting, you can also request certified Verra & Gold Standard carbon credits on top.

Frequently asked questions

How much CO₂ does a website produce? A single page view is usually 0.5–5 g CO₂, so a site serving a million page views a year sits at roughly 0.5–5 tonnes of CO₂. Page weight and the cleanliness of your hosting decide where in that range you land.

How can I reduce my website's carbon footprint? Shrink page weight, compress and lazy-load images, cut unused code, cache assets and move to a host powered by renewable energy. These steps lower emissions and load times together, and you can offset whatever remains.

Can planting trees offset a website's emissions? Yes. After you have estimated your annual footprint and reduced what you can, funding traceable trees or certified carbon credits lets you balance the CO₂ you cannot yet remove.