It is time to change. SEOs can play a key part in helping to clean up the web. Sustainable web designers are showing us the way with the sustainable web manifesto. It's time for us to act, it's time for us to change.
It's time for us to drive impact to clean up the web.
OUR PURPOSE
We aim to empower SEOs and digital marketers with the tools and connections needed to create a meaningful and long-lasting impact on creating a carbon-friendly internet.
Our Next GreenSEO Event
Join us on Wednesday 29th April 2026 for the fifth GreenSEO event, part of BrightonSEO fringe.
The GreenSEO Manifesto
- We will do all within our power and influence to make the web a greener place.
- Each month we pledge to take one action each towards this goal.
- We share, open source, support and help advise each other.
- We talk to people about the impact of the web on the environment and invite like-minded souls to join the green SEO movement.
Together we make a difference. Together we can succeed.
Problems to solve
There are so many things that you can do to take action to make the internet a greener place. We hope some of these ideas and toolsets will help you make a difference, whether it's wholesale changes or through incremental marginal gains.
We still have many, many questions and problems to solve - send us them here so we can post them up or try to help.
Top 10 most impactful next steps
- Baseline your current position - measure your impact
- Create a roadmap / get buy-in
- Swap to a renewable energy-hosted data centre
- Deal with images and videos - any media files / PDFs
- Archive or remove redundant content via a content audit
- Focus on Core Web Vitals & Page Speed
- Address crawl budgets and crawler activity
- Implement dark mode (or toggled dark mode)
- Apply eco best practices for design, fonts & accessibility
- Improve the UX flow/customer journey
Green SEO Resources and Tools
We have gathered resources and tools to help us SEOs to make the web greener. This is just the start of creating open source toolkits for you to create impact.
Do you have a great resource tool to help green up the web? - Send us an email so we can post it up or try to help.
Green SEO Resources
- Sustainable Web Manifesto: Great for helping explain the need for a sustainable web, very simply.
- What is sustainable web design? More information but very well put together. If you had to send a client any one link, this is the one. It also links to the manifesto early on.
- The Green Web Directory: This is a list of certified green web hosts.
- 20 ways to make your website more energy efficient: Leading the way in sustainable web design and providing toolsets, WordPress themes and much more. Buy the book. All salute Tom & Wholegrain Digital.
- Digital Declutter for Businesses: Tackles an overall approach to digital sustainability for a social business.
- 14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites: For conversations with developers, ask if they've heard of Steve Souders. He's a legendary early web dev, he wrote the book on web optimization.
- The climate impact of ICT: For academics, this is the most comprehensive paper on how damaging the internet is, and its greenhouse gas emissions.
- Green Software Brighton: A Brighton based community dedicated to digital sustainability.
Green SEO Tools
- The following are great for benchmarking some of the most important sustainability metrics: Ecograder and Website Carbon Calculator
- Screaming Frog SEO Spider: The most popular SEO crawler uses CO2.js for measuring the carbon emissions of any given page and highlights the pages that need the most attention To make the most of this data, check-out BM Digital’s Website Carbon Audit guide too.
- GreenPT is a green LLM running on 100% renewable energy.
- Digital Carbon Online automatically assesses, tracks and reports the carbon emissions of an entire website.
- Digital Beacon is a great tool for benchmarking and building recommendations.
- Treo Site Speed is a good overall website performance tester and more legible than Google Lighthouse.
- Fonts Squirrel's Webfont Generator is an industry standard font compressor. Even if you don't change the settings at all you'll cut down ~75% of the weight - no reason not to use it.
- Before you resort to online image compressors, the best image compression tool on the market is built into Photoshop and Illustrator. It's the old 'save for web' (Alt + Ctrl + Shift + S). You can see the compressed image in real-time so you can compress it to a level of quality you're comfortable with.
- Once you have your PNG or JPEG, convert it to WebP for even more savings. Or this one for converting SVGs.
- For a unique approach to images, check-out dithering too. Some stakeholders won't love the way this looks, but it’s super cool for the right websites.
- Use modern protocols such as HTTP3 - this tool checks for HTTP2 and this one checks for HTTP3.
- Use modern compression such as Brotli - this tool checks to see if a site supports Brotli.
About GreenSEO
GreenSEO was formed whilst three people met at the Brighton SEO conference. A talk delivered by Stu Davies on How the internet impacts the planet and what to do about it sparked Will & Rowan to approach him and they agreed on a meetup.
Organisers:
- Stu Davies (Creative Bloom) - LinkedIn
- Will Barnes - Bluesky
- Rowan Chernin (Cisco) - LinkedIn
- Dawn Regan (Migrate Media)
GreenSEO meetups:
Brighton: Every second Wednesday(ish) at the Brunswick Pub, BN3 1JF.
Learnings
Sharing our learnings from our successes - so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.
Feel free to share with us your learnings here.
- User polls (internal or external) are very powerful to get stakeholders on board for changes.
- Start small, then push out.
- Try an incremental, marginal gains approach if resistance will be high - archive pages in dark mode is a great way into this.
- A dark mode on/off switch helps with ‘how will it look’ jitters.
- Use data to contextualize your argument e.g. page CO2 weight of your pages vs the competition provides a compelling argument for change and is VERY powerful.
- Internal people are very up for this - find friends and get the CSR & Sustainability teams on board.
- Talk to people about the impact of the web on the environment and invite like-minded souls to join the green SEO movement.
Other GreenSEO Events
April 2026 will be our the fifth GreenSEO event as part of the BrightonSEO fringe. Here's what we shared at previous events:
Built with:
This website has been created to be as carbon-friendly as possible in its design and construction.
To keep it light, we have built this site using the following tech:
- HTTP/3, TLS 1.3 and HSTS
- No tracking, images or favicon
- CloudFlare caching
- GitHub Pages
- Tutanota email
