Navigating the complexities of sustainability on the web

Every visit to every website is powered by real infrastructure consuming real resources, and as the web continues to grow, so does its demand on the planet.

Sustainability is rarely framed around the web, and yet it's a tool we all use to build and consume content daily. Thankfully, this is starting to change within the creative industry. The question has become less about how the web affects the environment and more about how we respond to this reality. That response, however, is not a simple one to craft. Every decision for a given project, from conception to delivery, creates opportunities for tension.

As the platforms and services we use day-to-day evolve, so do our expectations of what they can deliver. Today's web experiences are expected to do everything; inspire, delight, perform, convert, all whilst minimising environmental impact. The challenge is that these goals often directly conflict with each other. What makes a site visually impressive, for example, might increase its impact on the environment. Understanding these tensions is essential for making informed decisions that balance creativity, performance, and responsibility.

At Driftime, we've dedicated a lot of our time and energy to uncovering and alleviating these tensions, and we've identified three prominent ones:

Expression vs. Efficiency

Have you ever come across a website that's blown you away? Today's web is capable of supporting extremely rich and vibrant experiences with striking visuals, high-quality media, and smooth motion. These are all elements that help brands and narratives come alive and leave visitors impressed and inspired. Modern developer tooling and assistance from the ever-growing intelligence of LLMs has made these experiences easier than ever to achieve, but at what cost?

These heavier web experiences often rely on larger file sizes for media assets and the libraries powering much of the experience. More data means more energy, from the servers hosting the content to the devices using it. It's a direct relationship that's easy to overlook when we're focused on the visual impact.

HTTP Archive's Web Almanac (opens in a new window) reports that the median desktop home page weight rose from ~1.2 MB in 2014 to ~2.86 MB by July 2025, and mobile from ~0.5 MB to ~2.56 MB. Year-on-year, the median desktop home page grew by 7.3% and mobile by 8.4%.

This trend reflects a type of paradox (opens in a new window). As web technologies advance, you might expect websites to become more efficient. Better tools, smarter caching, static site generation; these should all lead to leaner experiences. Instead, they've made it easier to justify heavier ones.

Here's an important distinction though: expression isn't inherently wasteful nor is it a bad thing! Naturally, as a creative agency, expression is at the core of our process. Striking visuals and enriched storytelling have their place in the industry. For many industries such as our own, a visually immersive presence isn't just decoration — it's a part of the product. In these contexts, heavier assets can be justified if they serve a clear purpose and are delivered as responsibly as possible.

The real challenge isn't about stripping the web entirely of expression (because that would obviously be awful), but it's about being intentional. Questioning every animation, every autoplaying video, and every giant image, and asking whether they are truly adding value or simply adding weight.

Metrics vs. Meaning

So if expression comes at a cost, how do we actually measure it? How can we determine where the balance lies?

Carbon calculators like Website Carbon Calculator (opens in a new window) and performance analysers such as Google's PageSpeed Insights (opens in a new window) each provide a way to quantify how much energy a website might consume, how it performs, or how accessible it is. These tools can act as a guide towards building more thoughtful, sustainable web experiences.

However, they can only ever tell part of the story. Most work on simplified assumptions, and whilst they can provide useful benchmarks, they fall short when you introduce modern practices like serverless architectures, CDNs, or caching. At Driftime, we host our projects on Vercel (opens in a new window). Their Edge networks (opens in a new window) and Fluid compute model (opens in a new window) distribute content closer to users and scale server resources based on demand, which is powerful for both performance and energy usage. But these practices carry no weight when fed to the aforementioned tools. A website hosted on Vercel gets assessed and scored in exactly the same way as a traditional, dedicated server running continuously from a single location, consuming the same resources whether it's serving a million visitors or a thousand.

Vercel runs on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which as of 2024 reports being powered by 100% renewable energy (opens in a new window), a claim that has been independently verified by a third-party (opens in a new window). It's worth noting that "100% renewable" at hyperscaler scale is often achieved through renewable energy certificates and power purchase agreements rather than direct supply to every data centre, so the picture is more nuanced than a single claim suggests. Still, it represents a meaningful commitment, and for platforms like Vercel that depend on AWS, it's a strong foundation.

So this should mean we can demonstrate to our clients that their websites are running on cutting-edge infrastructure and are completely green, right? Not quite. The way modern web infrastructure works creates verification challenges that carbon calculators and automated checkers weren't designed to handle, and this is where sustainability measurement starts to become a question of trust.

Trust vs. Transparency

If the numbers don't always tell the full story, then the question becomes "how do we communicate sustainability in a way that's transparent, trustworthy, and meaningful"?

Many websites today, including our own, are built as distributed systems rather than running on one central server. They're spread across networks where the frontend is served from one provider, content is managed by a headless CMS elsewhere, assets are delivered via a CDN, and databases are hosted separately. This distribution is beneficial: content loads faster, more reliably, and often transfers less data thanks to caching. But it makes sustainability measurement much trickier.

If your site is cached on a server in Frankfurt, does that mean it's powered by Germany's energy grid? What happens if the request falls back to a data centre in Virginia? If your CDN provider claims to use green energy, how does that translate when your content could be served from anywhere? Carbon calculators typically work by looking at a hosting provider's IP address, finding the associated data centre, and making assumptions about its energy source. When your site could be served from anywhere across a distributed network, that direct lookup becomes much harder to achieve.

Cloud hosting can be greener in practice by reducing data travel distances, optimising resource usage, and leaning on renewable energy providers, but those benefits are difficult to quantify. What gets reported in the metrics is often a flattened, simplified version of a much more complex reality. At Driftime, we've long struggled with the irony that our websites are reported as "not green" by automated checkers, even though we know they're running on infrastructure powered by renewable energy. The problem isn't that the tools are poor or malicious; it's that the underlying complexity makes accuracy challenging. The numbers can reassure us, but they rarely capture the whole picture, and when those numbers get presented without nuance, they can end up shaping or eroding trust.

This is not just a technical problem — it's a trust problem. One where transparency becomes as important as the numbers themselves.

At Driftime, we see this gap between perception and reality as an opportunity rather than a problem. Being open about the complexities of modern web infrastructure helps clients understand why a calculated score or automated label doesn't always tell the whole story. Responsible practices don't always translate into neat metrics.

We reached out to both Vercel and the Green Web Foundation (opens in a new window) to help us navigate this. Vercel confirmed that their infrastructure runs on AWS, but stated that they could not share their IP ranges with Green Web Foundation, claiming they were proprietary. This makes Green Web Foundation's automated verification process impossible. However, the brilliant folks over at Green Web Foundation understand this problem well, and they were extremely helpful in working with us on a solution. By providing our own evidence that our site is hosted on Vercel, that Vercel runs on AWS (as confirmed by Vercel), and that AWS is powered by renewable energy (as reported by AWS and confirmed by a third-party), we were able to have driftime.com verified. 🎉

Despite these verification challenges, we chose Vercel as our primary hosting platform. The developer experience is smooth and it handles our deployment workflow exactly how we need it to. As the team behind Next.js, it also offers the most natural integration for our tech stack, ensuring that with every release, its features are always instantly available and fully optimised for the platform.

Transparency is essential, but it's not always enough to build trust on its own. Metrics, scores, and labels can mislead; only clear communication and evidence bridges the gap. Sustainability on the web isn't just technical. It requires honesty, explanation, and context to ensure clients and audiences understand the choices and compromises that shape an expressive yet responsible web.

Building sustainable websites isn't about choosing one ideal path. It's about navigating tensions and making deliberate choices. Every project involves balancing expression and efficiency, weighing metrics against meaning, and aligning trust with transparency.

At Driftime, our approach isn't to chase perfection — it's to be intentional. Every design choice and technical decision should have a clear rationale, because expression has value only when it serves the experience. Tools like carbon calculators and PageSpeed Insights provide guidance, not authority, and understanding their limitations matters as much as the scores they produce. Transparency builds trust, but only when we're willing to explain the infrastructure, hosting choices, and sustainability practices behind what makes a website "green", including the parts that aren't neat or simple.

What's considered sustainable for one project may not suit another. Context shapes every decision, and intentionality should guide those decisions rather than a rigid set of rules. Sustainability on the web isn't a trade-off between creativity and responsibility. It's a practice of thoughtful choices, clear communication, and conscious design. By recognising the tensions, understanding their implications, and embracing transparency, we can create web experiences that delight people, serve brands, and respect the planet, all at once.