Make Your Wordpress Site A Lean Green Machine

Your website lives on at least one server somewhere.

Each time someone clicks, scrolls or buys, that server requires electricity to keep things running and stop itself from overheating.

Your server isn't sitting alone in a quiet office either. It lives in a data centre, where hundreds, if not thousands, of servers are all crammed together. All of them need electricity. All of them need cooling. Together, they have a major impact on the environment.

You still need your website. But you want to reduce the harm you're causing through it.

The good news is there are plenty of ways to streamline and optimise your WordPress website to make it a lean, green, and well-oiled machine.

Let's dig deeper.

The impact of a website

Every single piece of data on your website — from that cute cat photo to the CSS code that turns your headings a different colour — lives on servers. Those servers don't just store the data; they also process every request too. Updating a page, logging in a user or blocking requests from spam servers — it all takes power.

The more processing power and storage space your site demands, the harder the server has to work. Cut those demands and you cut the amount of electricity needed to keep it all running. As a certain major supermarket chain likes to say, "every little helps".

This isn't just about electricity either. A lighter website that requires less processing power and storage also loads quicker for visitors. That means more page views, more conversions, happier customers, and a better shot at ranking higher in search results.

While most environmentally conscious decisions involve slowing down (slower travel, slower delivery, slower agriculture), in this case, being faster really is better.

How to cut down your impact

Making your website more efficient doesn't have to be daunting. It's rarely 'one big fix', more a process of small changes that add up to a big difference. And you can tackle them one at a time, at your own pace.

Optimise your images

Thanks to high-speed internet, apps and powerful phone cameras, it's easy to forget just how big image files can be. Left unchecked, they can eat through storage, use lots of power and slow down loading.

99% of the time, your images don't need to be high-resolution, especially if they're "print-quality". You're not printing them out, you're viewing them on a website. And, for a lot of websites, they're being viewed on something that's designed to fit into your hand.

You can dramatically reduce file size without an obvious loss in quality through three easy steps.

Choose the right format

Each image format has a specific purpose. Using the wrong one can add thousands of bytes without you realising.

JPG/JPEG is best for photographs and images with complex colour profiles. PNG is great for images that have transparency without sacrificing the colour profile. And a good SVG isn't just perfect for your logo or icon set, it's also code-based and tiny.

GIFs have their place for animation, and WEBP is ultra-optimised for photography, but the trifecta of JPG, PNG and SVG covers most images you'll be putting on your site.

Compress your images

Image files often carry a lot of extra data that you don't need. Compression tools can strip this out without changing how the image looks.

If you have an image-heavy site (such as an online shop), plugins like Imagify, Smush, or TinyPNG can take care of this work. If you only have a few images, there are plenty of free online tools that'll do the job before you even upload the files into your WordPress site.

Resize your images

Your carefully curated row of products has space for a 100-pixel wide image each. So why put in an image that's 8000 pixels wide? Not only does it look weird being compressed into such a small space, but you're also filling up the page with giant images that reduce your page load speed to a crawl.

Make sure you have the right size for the right space, and resize your images before you upload them. WordPress will do some image resizing, letting you pick a smaller version in the gallery, but if you always find yourself using smaller versions, save time (and space) by shrinking the originals ahead of time.

Review your plugins

Every plugin you add to your site adds more code, even when deactivated. If it's running in the background the entire time, that's more processing power being used. And it all adds up over time.

Review every plugin you've installed on your site. Do you use them regularly? Do they need to be active all the time, or can they be regularly deactivated? Have they been updated recently? Are they still being regularly updated?

Remove the ones that are deactivated and that you don't regularly use, and have a close look at any that haven't been updated recently. Not only will this help performance, it also cuts down on security risks, as old plugins are an easy gateway for hackers to sneak in.

Sometimes a lighter alternative can make a huge difference. If there are similar plugins that provide the same functionality but are smaller and faster, consider switching to those as well. When you consider the 786kb taken up by The SEO Framework versus the 5MB taken up by Yoast... It helps. It definitely helps.

Think about your theme

A good theme can make or break a site. Choose well and your site will be quick, clean and easy to use. Choose badly and your visitors won't stick around.

A lighter, more responsive theme can make a huge difference to your site. Good examples of these are Astra, GeneratePress, and OceanWP. There are plenty of good themes out there, but watch out for those that are built specifically for page builder plugins — they start out light, but can quickly bulk up in order to add the functionality needed for the page builder.

Remember: once you find a theme you like and want to keep, delete the ones you aren't using. That's vital space being taken up by something you'll never look at again.

Clean up your site

It isn't just your images, plugins and themes that weigh down your site. It's all your pages too. What do you have on there? How many scripts are you loading? What's taking up the most space and is it necessary?

Check your File Manager to see which files are largest, or run a tool like DebugBear's Page Size Checker to spot what's slowing things down.

Also look at your pages. Do you have a lots of thin pages with little content? Consolidating them into longer, richer pages can cut clutter and help SEO at the same time. Think of it as a good house cleaning for your site.

Go static

If your site is essentially a brochure with no interactive elements, consider going static. You get all the power of WordPress, but the speed and lightness of a plain HTML page. A static site is created in WordPress, but the live site doesn't refer back to the server each time it needs to build a new page — it's already all there.

Plugins such as Simply Static can do this for you, and if your site doesn't need any interactive elements, such as a contact form or e-commerce, it's a great way to massively cut down on the response time and power usage of your website.

Get optimising

There are also plugins that handle optimisation for you. Caching, minification, lazy loading — all of these cut down the size of your pages, reduce the number of server calls and speed up your site loading.

Our Managed WordPress packages all come with LightSpeed Cache installed and LightSpeed Web Server included. With LightSpeed Cache, you can cache pages, choose how often your cache refreshes, add in a CDN, optimise your images, minify and combine your CSS, clean up your database and a lot more. We have a detailed guide to LiteSpeed Cache that's loaded with tips for optimising your site.

Find a green host

Even the fastest, leanest WordPress site in the world still depends on its host. And if your host isn't doing its part, your environmental impact can still be high. This is because many data centres use fossil fuels to power their servers and waste a lot of potable water cooling them down.

At Krystal, we're proud of our commitment to sustainability, and have worked closely with our data centres to ensure they're powered by 100% renewable energy and that every kilowatt is used as efficiently as possible.

By combining a well-optimised website and a green host, you can be sure that the changes you make online can start to add up to something bigger.

Small changes, big impact

You don't have to rebuild your website from scratch to make it greener and faster. Start with small steps — compress an image, remove an unused plugin, switch to a lighter theme. Each little tweak cuts your impact and makes your site better for your visitors too.

And when you pair that with a green host, you're not just running a website. You're helping to build a web that works harder for people and is kinder to the planet.