Sustainable web design, measured page by page

Your website's carbon footprint is not a mysterious quantity. The usual way to estimate it is from the weight of what your visitors download, multiplied by how many of them download it, and it is one of the few parts of your business anyone can estimate from the outside.

Three numbers, taken the same way every time, so they can be compared.

• Weight. Everything a first-time visitor downloads, in kilobytes.

• Requests. How many separate files the page asks for.

• Estimated website emissions per visit, from Website Carbon, which uses the Sustainable Web Design Model.

You can check the first two in any browser's developer tools, and the third by putting an address into websitecarbon.com. We have no relationship with Website Carbon. Nothing on this page asks you to take our word for it.

This page: 56 KB in 6 requests, measured 28 September 2026.

Website Carbon rates our home page A+, cleaner than 99% of the web pages it has tested, at under 0.01 g of carbon dioxide per visit. Tested 24 September 2026.

The environmental case and the practical case are the same case.

A small page opens quickly on a weak signal, on an old phone, out of town, on the ferry. It uses less of someone's data. Nobody pays, in time or money, for code that does nothing for them.

We build this way because it makes a better website. The smaller footprint comes with it.

The websites on our standard plan are served by a global network, from whichever of its data centres is closest to the visitor. From New Zealand, that's Auckland.

The Green Web Foundation lists our standard host as running on green energy. That's true of the host, not something we did: every website on the same host gets the same result, including ones built with the heaviest page builders. What we control is the weight of the page.

If you want more than green energy from your host, read on.

If you care where your website's energy comes from, you probably care where its data goes, and who can be made to hand it over. Here is the whole picture, plainly.

Your website collects almost nothing. We don't build contact forms, logins or member areas, so there's no store of your customers' details sitting on a server waiting to leak.

Three things do leave the page. The pages themselves, sent by the host to whoever asks for them. The routine records every host keeps of each request: an address, a time, a page. And the visit count, which counts visits, not people, and which any visitor can turn off with one click. Prefer a different analytics tool? Tell us which, and we'll add it the way that tool prescribes. If it needs your visitors' permission before it runs, we'll ask for it properly.

On our standard plan, the host is a US company. It serves New Zealand visitors from Auckland, but US law can require a US company to hand over data it holds, wherever in the world it holds it.

For most businesses that's a fair trade for a fast, well protected website. For some organisations it isn't. They're usually the ones reading this page, and we built an option for them.

For this option, we host your website with a New Zealand owned and operated cloud company. That company is Toitū net carbonzero certified as an organisation. The certification belongs to the provider of this option: not to Chur, not to our standard hosting, and not to your website. Ask us and we'll show you the certificate, and exactly how you can refer to it in your own reporting.

With this add-on:

• Your website is stored and served in New Zealand, with no copies kept overseas.

• The connection is encrypted all the way to the server in New Zealand. The only other company in the path is the international security company that provides this option's network-level attack protection. It can see that traffic is flowing. It can't read your pages, and it keeps no copies.

• The company running it is New Zealand owned, and answers to New Zealand law.

• Your monthly report still shows how many people visited and which pages they read.

• Your hosting spend stays in New Zealand.

What it costs you, honestly: $25 + GST a month on top of your plan. Your website is slower for visitors overseas, because there's no copy of it near them. And if the New Zealand server ever fails, we point your website at a spare copy overseas until it's fixed, and we'll tell you when that happens.

What it doesn't do: cut your emissions in any way you'd notice. A page this light uses so little energy that where it's served from barely moves the number, and we'd rather tell you that than sell you something on a claim that doesn't hold. This plan is about who owns the infrastructure, which country's law applies to it, and where your money goes. If those matter to your organisation, it's the right choice, and a real one.

The same discipline runs through how we build for accessibility: real text, headings in order, strong contrast, everything usable with a keyboard, and no animation for anyone whose device asks for less of it.

An automated accessibility scan and a contrast check run on every page of this website each time it changes. Organisations that care about their footprint and their data usually care that their website works for everyone, too. All three come from building it properly the first time.

Website Carbon's figure is a modelled estimate, not a meter reading. Nobody can directly measure the electricity used by one visit to one page. The model applies the same published method to every page, so comparing two websites means something even though the figure itself is an estimate.

Every number on this page carries the date it was taken.

To be straight with you: the emissions from one small business website are small. A lighter website won't fix anything on its own. What it does is use a fraction of the energy of the heavy version, load faster for everyone, and cost nothing extra. There's no good reason to build the heavy version.

Before your website goes live, we measure its weight, its requests and its Website Carbon rating, and send you the numbers with the date. You can check them yourself any time.