How to Commit to Being an Eco-Friendly Online Company

To be an eco-friendly online company, you first have to know what it means to be eco-friendly at all! Whether you want to call it sustainable, environmentally conscious, green – whatever. Being eco-friendly means centering products and processes in your decision-making that are better for the earth. 

This might mean using energy-efficient tools, or avoiding non-renewable resources. You’ve probably heard of eco-friendly cars that use earth-friendly emissions. Or you may have heard about keeping an eco-friendly home by recycling and using energy efficient lightbulbs. An eco-friendly online company follows all those same principles. 

But, what about a fully remote online business? If you don’t have lightbulbs or products that you use in an office, where do those sustainable choices come into play?

What does it mean for an online business to be eco-friendly?

Not all businesses are entirely online or entirely physical. Many have elements of both. A brick and mortar store may have a website through which they sell products. A service-based business may have online tools they use for marketing and sales. An online agency may have an office where employees work together. No matter which category you fall into, right now we’re focused on the digital part of those businesses. 

Online businesses can prioritize sustainability in nearly every decision they make. One of the most popular topics in the conversation about environmental efficiency is fuel usage. You may think an online company doesn’t have to worry about that,  but if you require employees to commute to an office or use an irresponsible shipping company for your online store, you’re contributing to an increase in gas emissions.  These decisions can sneak up on you, and it’s a long-term process to find all the ways you can become a sustainable business!

How does the internet use power?

It’s important to realize that just because something is digital, doesn’t mean it doesn’t have real-world effects. Every time you use anything electronic, it’s being powered from somewhere. Every time you visit an app or a website, a server is utilizing energy to make that happen. The data centers, networks, and user devices that function within the internet make up 2% of global energy consumption. That’s between 3 and 6% of all the electricity worldwide. 

Take data centers alone – Data centers use collections of servers and computers to power websites, apps, internal systems, and more. Imagine how much power your laptop or desktop computer uses, then imagine that times a thousand, per data center. These data centers do a massive amount of computing; they need to be on all the time, and they require electricity to cool them.

Keeping these types of power usages in mind, we can start to build a picture of how to optimize a digital experience for sustainability. 

We often discuss this kind of energy usage in watt-hours. For example, a typical smartphone battery holds an average of 9.5 watt hours of electricity. This is a good benchmark to remember as we outline power usage moving forward. 

As an online business, it’s important to identify what components of your processes and systems rely on energy. Make a list of all the things you use digitally to support your business. This could include:

• Emails (sending an email can consume up to 3.7 microwatts)
• A company website (one page view can consume up to 108 watt-hours)
• Online conferencing (one 1 hour conversation on Zoom could use 48.6 watt-hours)
• Social media (one minute of scrolling through a newsfeed is equal to driving a car about 40 feet)

Also consider how often and why you use things like:

• A CRM 
• Project management software
• Phone calls
• Video calls
• Text alerts
• Tracking and analytics tools
• AI tools 

All of these things expend energy to use! For example, one ChatGPT query requires 2.9 watt hours of electricity. This is nearly 900% more energy required for a Google search. 

This doesn’t mean you need to roll everything back and avoid using innovative tools and software. But, if your goal is to be a more eco-friendly online company, it’s important to be aware of the general effects your decisions have. 

One of the most influential things you can focus on as an eco-friendly online business is your website. So let’s break down what it means for a site to be eco-friendly and how you can optimize yours.

What does it mean for a website to be eco-friendly?

Evaluating a website for sustainability mainly comes down to energy consumption. When someone uses your site, how much energy is used? More importantly: how much energy is wasted? 

We can see how energy is consumed by a site by looking at data transfer and page load times. These two factors are mainly affected by the following:

Website hosting

The hosting company you use determines how quickly your site is served to browsers. The higher the bandwidth your host has, the faster the pages of your site will load. Hosting companies need to be good at managing resources in order to make sure your site loads quickly, and the quicker the load times, the less energy used. 

Fun fact: If  you’re really serious about optimizing the sustainability of your WordPress website, GreenGeeks is one of the only WordPress hosting companies whose main focus is being eco-friendly. 

Web page caching

Web caching also has a large impact on how quickly your site loads. By “caching” or “storing” certain information on a browser, a return visitor can load your site much more quickly. There are tons of web caching plugins available for WordPress sites, and you can often enable caching at the server level, too. 

Ease of use

Believe it or not, the amount of time your users spend on your site affects its sustainability. While we may want users to spend a lot of time on our site for marketing purposes, it’s not the most energy-efficient use case. Making the site easy to use has a huge impact on time on site. A simple-to-use navigation, clear user interfaces, and user-focused design experiences reduce energy consumption. When users are not confused or frustrated by a site, they can use it efficiently and move on. 

File size 

A website is actually just a series of files, organized together in a way that a browser can display. Your site is mostly made up of text, code, and image files. If these files are large, they load more slowly. One of the most impactful ways to reduce energy consumption of a website is to minimize and compress files whenever you can. 

Compress images with a tool like Pixlr or Smush before uploading them to your site. Hire web developers who specialize in writing lean code that runs quickly.  Pick plugins and themes that do exactly what you need without storing extra features that you don’t need.

The 2025 Eco-Friendly Website Checklist

In 2025, Web Pro Geeks is making a pledge to become as eco-friendly as possible. We’re proud to have already made great strides, and we invite you to improve alongside us!

Keep this checklist handy to refer to as you grow your online business. 

• Do not require employees to travel to an office – be 100% remote
• Use an eco-friendly and fast hosting provider
• Make good use of caching to speed up your site
• Optimize navigation, UI, and UX
• Compress and optimize file sizes 
• Delete what you don’t need, including plugins, themes, pages, and posts
• Enable lazy loading for images and videos on all pages
• Use simple fonts instead of custom ones
• Use less AI for content generation
• Minimize the use of video and animations
• Use sustainable options for shipping products you sell on your website
• Send fewer marketing emails – make the ones you do send awesome!