Gloucestershire Website Carbon Audits. Here’s What We Found.

Gloucestershire Website Carbon Audit

The average web page produces approximately 1.75g of CO₂ per page view.

That doesn’t sound like much until you consider that our Gloucestershire Website Carbon Audit showed that with 1,000 monthly visitors is responsible for around 6kg of carbon emissions every year, just from people reading it.

Multiply that across the county’s 50,000+ registered businesses, and you have a measurable, largely invisible environmental problem that almost no one is talking about.

We decided to start the conversation. Over the course of two weeks, we ran carbon audits on 20 Gloucestershire business websites, a spread of sectors, sizes, and locations, using the Website Carbon Calculator, Green Web Foundation hosting check and our own content carbon calculator. The results were more varied than we expected, and the patterns were clear.

Here’s what we found.

The Methodology

We selected 20 businesses across Gloucester, Cheltenham, Stroud, Tewkesbury, and Cirencester. The sample covers professional services, hospitality, retail, charities, and public sector organisations. We’re not naming the worst performers without giving them a chance to respond, but we are sharing the data, the patterns, and the sectors where the problems are most acute.

For each site, we measured:

• Carbon per page view
• Hosting type: green or grey infrastructure
• Page weight: total kilobytes transferred on first load
• Performance grade: 0 to 100 based on load time and Core Web Vitals
• Overall carbon rating: A to F graded through the website carbon API

Each audit was run on the homepage, as the most representative single page of a site’s overall build quality.

The Results: A County-Wide Snapshot

Of the 20 Gloucestershire websites audited:

• 3 sites were hosted on verified green infrastructure
• 17 sites were running on grey (fossil-fuel-powered) hosting
• Average carbon per page view: 2.1g CO₂e, more than four times the global benchmark of 0.5g
• Heaviest page: 8.4MB on first load (a hospitality site in Cheltenham)
• Lightest page: 0.3MB (a Gloucester-based charity)
• Best carbon score: 0.05g CO₂e per view, cleaner than 92% of pages tested globally
• Worst carbon score: 4.8g CO₂e per view, dirtier than 94% of pages tested globally

The spread is significant. The best-performing site in our audit produces 120 times less carbon per page view than the worst. Both are Gloucestershire businesses, broadly similar in size and sector. The difference comes down entirely to how the site was built and where it is hosted.

What the Worst Offenders Have in Common

The five highest-carbon sites in our audit shared a predictable profile:

• Grey hosting: none of the five worst performers was on green-certified infrastructure. This is the single biggest lever for reducing a website’s carbon footprint. Switching hosts doesn’t require a rebuild; it can cut emissions by 50–80% overnight.
• Heavy image files: uncompressed hero images, full-resolution photography loaded on mobile, image carousels that load all frames regardless of whether the user ever sees them. Image weight accounts for the majority of page weight on most sites, and most of it is avoidable.
• Bloated page builders: three of the five worst performers were built on page builders that load large CSS and JavaScript frameworks regardless of what features are actually used on a given page. This is a structural problem that typically requires a rebuild to fix properly.
• No lazy loading: resources are loaded immediately on page open, whether the user scrolled to them or not.
• No caching strategy: returning visitors load the full page on every visit.

What the Best Performers Have in Common

The five cleanest sites were equally consistent:

• All five were on green-certified hosting
• All five had page weights under 500KB
• All five used custom-coded or carefully configured themes rather than off-the-shelf page builders
• Three of the five had been built or rebuilt in the last two years
• All five scored an 85 or a 100 on Core Web Vitals

The correlation between low carbon and good performance is not a coincidence. Clean, lean code loads faster. Faster pages use less energy per view. Green hosting routes that generate energy through renewable sources. The environmental and commercial cases for sustainable web design point in the same direction.

The Sector Breakdown

• Professional services (accountancy, legal, financial): Mixed results. Several well-maintained sites in Cheltenham’s professional cluster scored well. Older corporate sites in Gloucester city centre dragged the sector average down.
• Hospitality (hotels, restaurants, event venues): The worst-performing sector overall. Heavy image use, video backgrounds, and complex booking integrations on grey hosting infrastructure. The carbon cost of hospitality websites is consistently underappreciated.
• Charities and social enterprises: Surprisingly strong. The two best-performing sites in the audit were charities. Likely explained by the fact that sustainability is core to their identity, and that smaller budgets push towards leaner builds.
• Retail (independent and regional): Variable. E-commerce functionality adds legitimate weight, but several retail sites in our audit were carrying significant avoidable bloat beyond their product images and checkout flows.
• Public sector: One site audited. Mid-table on carbon, significantly below average on performance. Hosted on grey infrastructure.

What This Means for Gloucestershire Businesses

Your website’s carbon footprint is not an abstract environmental metric. It is a direct reflection of how your site is built, and how your site is built affects how fast it loads, how well it ranks in Google, and how much it costs to maintain.

A high-carbon website is almost always also a slow website. A slow website loses visitors before they convert. Google measures page speed and uses it as a ranking signal. The business case and the environmental case for a lower-carbon site are the same.

Switching to green hosting is the fastest single action most Gloucestershire businesses can take. It typically costs no more than standard hosting, takes less than a day to migrate, and can cut your site’s carbon emissions by more than half.

Beyond hosting, the structural improvements, leaner code, compressed images, proper caching, and a performance-first build require more investment, but they deliver more return: faster load times, better SEO, lower maintenance overhead, and a site that you can truthfully describe as sustainable.

Where Does Your Gloucestershire Website Sit?

We’ve built a free Sustainability Performance Audit that gives any Gloucestershire business an instant read on their website’s carbon score, speed, and accessibility, with a prioritised action list for improvement.

Audit your Gloucestershire website now

If your site came out poorly in your own audit and you want to understand what a sustainable rebuild would look like, take a look at our web design services for Gloucestershire businesses.

A Note on the Data

All audits were conducted in April 2026 using websitecarbon.com v3 and the Green Web Foundation API. Carbon figures represent estimated CO₂ equivalent per page view under standard conditions. Actual figures vary with user device, network, and caching state. This study is intended as a directional benchmark, not a precise measurement. We will repeat the audit in 12 months to track progress.

If your business was included in this audit and you’d like to discuss the results or request your individual data, contact us here.