An eco-friendly website design improves a business or organization by enhancing efficiency, user experience, and sustainability. A well-designed, intuitive, and fast-loading site keeps visitors engaged, boosts search engine rankings, and drives sales conversions—ultimately strengthening trust in your brand and supporting long-term growth. The following case study for the Sustainable Living Association(SLA) website redesign shows how Ouzel Creative improved the performance while aligning with the organization's values.
Client Overview
The Sustainable Living Association is a nonprofit that educates people and communities to make healthy and sustainable choices. They have been an active participant and hub in the community of Fort Collins and Northern Colorado for over 25 years.
Challenge
Sustainable Living Association’s website, designed 8 years ago, was outdated and did not reflect their vibrant brand identity. The user experience was cumbersome, limiting discovery and donating. In addition, the website did not match SLA’s values of lowering environmental impact. The website had a high carbon footprint and scored low for eco-friendliness. Their score of “E” is the lowest rated level on the Ecograder.com calculator. By lowering carbon emissions and resource consumption, an eco-friendly website would align with the organization's sustainability goals while maintaining performance and usability.
Solution
Ouzel Creative collaborated closely with Sustainable Living Association to craft a fresh, visually compelling website. By optimizing energy use, reducing server load, and leveraging green hosting, Ouzel Creative could lower environmental impact while improving speed and usability.
Key features included:
A clean design to reflect the brand’s core values
Strategic messaging to increase confidence and alignment with supporting SLA
Responsive layout optimized for both desktop and mobile devices
Integrated platform and sitemap organization enabling easy user experience
Educational blog section for visitor engagement
SEO-focused content structure and performance to increase organic search rankings
Eco-friendly solutions for the website platform, design, hosting and development
Platform/Hosting
WordPress was chosen as the platform due to its ability to be hosted on any provider that is committed to renewable energy rather than a proprietary platform where one is locked in to their hosting. In addition to WordPress, Bricks Builder was used, not only for its design capabilities, but also for its ability to produce clean, semantic code. This helps SEO, accessibility, and reduce file size.
The website is hosted on Kinsta, a respected managed WordPress hosting provider. They are a verified green hosting provider by the Green Web Foundation which means they use renewable energy to power data centers which is built on Google Cloud Platform. Kinsta allows users to choose which data center your website files are hosted. For SLA’s website the Iowa data center was selected due to its relative closeness and because it achieves one of the highest rates of carbon free energy on an hourly basis of any of the available Google servers in North America. Additionally, Kinsta utilizes Cloudflare’s (also a verified green host) CDN (content delivery network) which caches website files on servers nearest to website visitors. This enables website files to load faster and travel less distance saving energy.
Development
During the build phase Ouzel Creative converted images to AVIF format to lower file size. Icons were optimized and self hosted rather than link to a third party library which can slow down page rendering. The headline font is also self hosted and system font was used for the body copy. This means that the computer’s system font is used so that an additional font file doesn’t need to be transferred. Every kilobyte that doesn’t need to be transferred is energy saved.
Results
OLD homepage test scores on Ecograder:
Ecograder score: 33/100
Page emissions: an estimated 2.07grams of CO2 per pageload
OLD homepage test scores on Google’s Lighthouse:
Performance: 71
Accessibility: 82
Best practices: 78
SEO: 77
NEW homepage test scores on Ecograder:
Ecograder score: 86/100
Page emissions: an estimated 0.25grams of CO2 per page load
NEW homepage test scores on Google’s Lighthouse:
Performance: 100
Accessibility: 92
Best practices: 100
SEO: 92
Within 3 months of launch and taking a comparison snapshot of December 1, 2024 - January 25, 2025 with December 1, 2025 - January 25, 2026:
Total website traffic increased by 13%
Sessions increased by 11%, active users increased by 13% and new users increased by 14% showing an increasing base of users.
User feedback highlighted the site’s easy navigation and aesthetic appeal
Client Testimonial
“We had an incredible experience working with Ouzel Creative. They helped our nonprofit completely redesign our website with clear intentionality around reducing our digital carbon footprint while also increasing site traffic and usability. Their team truly understood our mission and translated it into a site that is not only beautiful, but also highly functional and easy to navigate.
The process was thoughtful, collaborative, and efficient, and the final result exceeded our expectations. We’re proud of our new website and grateful to have partnered with a team that shares our values. Highly recommend Ouzel Creative to any organization looking for purposeful, high-quality web design.”
— Kelli Falbo, Executive Director, Sustainable Living Association
Why Choose Ouzel Creative Studio?
Proven expertise in crafting brand-aligned, user-friendly websites
Collaborative approach that values client input and feedback
Transparent project management and clear communication
Commitment to measurable results that impact business growth
Explore more projects and discover how Ouzel Creative Studio can elevate your online presence at https://www.ouzelcreative.studio.