My favorite green tools to work with
You want to work in a greener and more sustainable way? Check out the listed tools and feel free to send me your own recommendations. None of the listed tools is paid advertisement.
Sustainability analysis
Digital Beacon
Digital Beacon is an awesome tool that I always like to use for website analysis. It shows CO2 emissions, page size and many useful tips.
Ecograder
Ecograder is another tool that allows you to analyze websites. It also gives you detailed advice on how to make the site greener.
Website Carbon
Website Carbon is a simple tool that shows the website’s CO2 emissions compared to others and whether the site is hosted green.
Globemallow browser add-on
Globemallow is a browser add-on that generates a report on the environmental sustainability of the website and gives advice on how to optimize it.
GreenSpector
GreenSpector supports you in analyzing emissions of public applications, not-public (e.g. business) applications and not yet published digital products.
Are my third parties green
Check the third party resources used by a website on their green hosting, data transfer, effective caching and carbon impact.
Toolkits and templates
Non-human Personas
Non-human Personas are profiles of ecosystems and animals that are negatively impacted by your project or that you would like to have a positive impact on. Try out my free templates for Miro and Figma.
Sustainability infused User Journey Maps
Sustainability infused User Journey Maps depict an entire process that a hypothetical user can go through and look at the ecological and social impact of each step. Try out my free templates for Miro and Figma.
Images and videos
Shortpixel
Shortpixel is the image compression tool I use the most. You can compress lots of images for free and it is super easy to use.
Smush WordPress plugin
Smush is THE WP plugin for image compression, lazy load and all kinds of other useful features. Highly rated from thousands of users.
Tiny PNG
Tiny PNG is compresses PNGs and JPEGs and is also very popular. You can add up to a pro plan or buy their Photoshop plugin.
Image Optim
Image Optim is a desktop tool for Mac (or a pay web version) with a lot of image features and great results.
RIOT optimizer
The Radical Image Optimization Tool is a desktop tool in which you can compress tons of different image formats. Really neat.
Handbrake
You want to compress videos? Handbrake is a small and super simple to use desktop tool with awesome results.
Cookie-less web analytics
Cabin Analytics
Cabin Analytics is a website analytics tool with a very small footprint, high data security and completely without cookies. The tool also shows the CO2 emissions of individual pages.
Koko Analytics
Koko Analytics is a WordPress plugin with very high data security standards and low data volume. With the plugin, pages can be analyzed directly in the WordPress backend.
Plausible Analytics
Plausible Analytics is another transparent web analytics tool with a big heart for privacy and without using cookies. You can find out more about their structures in this article.
Micro Analytics
Micro Analytics also wants to contribute to the shift to transparent web analytics tools. All without cookies and with very little data consumption.
Simple Analytics
Simple Analytics too comes without cookies and sees data protection as the highest good. The team has even designed mobile widgets for quick smartphone checks.
Statsy
Statsy comes not only with cookie-less tracking but also with realtime carbon footprint analytics that offers a lot more depth than most web carbon calculators.
Fathom
Fathom is another Google Analytics alternative that also takes privacy into account and generally focuses on data minimization.
Fonts, lazy loading, CSS/JS
Fonts
Optimise used fonts with FontSquirrel or Everything Fonts. Unused characters are removed from the font sets, thus reducing the size many times over. You can find more information on this topic in the Mightybites article about fonts.
Image Lazy Loading
Only load images outside the viewport when they are needed. Therefore add the Lazysizes script to your pages or use WordPress plugins like Smush, Autoptimize or Hummingbird.
JavaScript and CSS
Optimize and compress JavaScript and CSS to significantly reduce data. Use either WordPress plugins like Autoptimize, Hummingbird, WP Rocket or your own scripts.
Caching
Caching temporarily saves your website as a static page and thus reduces a lot of data and CO2. Use for example W3 Total Cache or Hummingbird as WordPress caching plugin and achieve better results in performance and data load.
Office and communications
Ecosia
Plant trees while searching the world wide web with the search engine Ecosia. Thousands of trees are planted already and the search is getting better and better!
EcoSend Newsletter
EcoSend is a climate-conscious email marketing platform. The company is committed to not only offsetting but reducing the emissions generated from email campaigns.
Edi Eco Website Builder
You want another solution to Squarespace, Wix, etc.? Check out Edi to create beautiful websites with sustainability built-in. It includes green hosting, lightweight templates and carbon budget calculations.
Sprout Website Builder
Sprout is a no-code low carbon website builder. It includes green hosting, easy-to-use templates and a native carbon calculator.
Overthere Link Tree
Overthere is a great alternative for link trees. It’s specifically designed in a lightweight way for a greener web.
Video conferencing with BigBlueButton
Start bigger video conferences with BigBlueButton in combination of Fairteaching as hoster. Best for big groups.
Video conferencing with Fairmeeting
Video chat with Jitsi on basis of the Fairmeeting servers. This way it’s green and your data is secure. Best for small groups.
Nextcloud
Nextcloud is a self-hosted data secure productivity tool with everything an office needs with cloud, data and messaging options.
Faircloud (in German)
Faircloud is a green cloud service that has a free starter package and additional options.
Miro
Miro helps to switch from paper post-its to digital ones. Work as a team on whiteboards, with post-it’s, mind maps, kanban boards and more.
Mural
Mural is another workspace for visual collaboration and reduction of real life post-its and paper trash.
Mattermost
Mattermost is an open source messaging tool that serves as a great alternative to Slack, Microsoft teams and others. Plus, it comes with great data security.
Cryptpad
Mostly known by data security passionates Cryptpad tool has cloud, document, kanban board and other features to offer.
Lamapoll (in German)
Create polls with Lamapoll that are green and data secure. Up to 50 participants per poll are free.
WeTell (German)
WeTell offers climate-friendly mobile phone packages and endeavours to bring sustainable standards to the telecommunications industry.
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Sustainable best practices
Get inspired by lightweight, user-friendly, aesthetic and sustainable UX/UI designs of the web.
My favorite resources
Scroll through my favorite articles, studies, podcasts, talks, communities, books and tools on sustainable web design.
Listen to the Green the Web podcast
Tune into ecological and social Research, UX and UI Design as well as other aspects of sustainable designers or business owners.
Work with me on your website, shop or app
You’re looking for sustainable user research, UX conception, UI design or simply someone who can look over things? Let’s get together!
Become a sustainable designer
As a designer you want to align your values with your job. Find out more about trainings, free resources, my blog and much more.