The Green Case for Static Websites

Quantifying the Energy and Carbon Savings of Migrating from WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace to Static Hosting

March 2026

Executive Summary

The web has a carbon problem. Dynamic, server-rendered websites consume far more energy than their static equivalents. The three dominant small-business website platforms — WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace — collectively power more than half the websites on the internet, and all three share the same fundamental inefficiency: they serve dynamically generated pages that are heavier, slower, and more carbon-intensive than they need to be.

Anglesite migrates websites from these platforms to static HTML hosted on Cloudflare Workers — infrastructure independently verified as 100% renewable by the Green Web Foundation. The result is a reduction in per-visit carbon emissions of 85–90%, depending on the source platform.

Squarespace sites are the worst performers. At 3,323 KB median page weight with no verified renewable energy policy, they generate nearly 10× the per-visit emissions of an optimized Anglesite site.

This white paper documents two classes of claim:

1. Per-site savings — the carbon reduction an individual business can expect from migrating to Anglesite, by source platform
2. Aggregate potential — the total reduction achievable if all eligible sites on these three platforms migrated to static hosting

All calculations use Version 4 of the Sustainable Web Design Model (SWDM v4), the peer-reviewed standard maintained by the Green Web Foundation, Wholegrain Digital, and Mightybytes.

1. Context: The CMS Landscape and Its Footprint

1.1 Market Scale

Three platforms define the architecture of the small-business web:

Sources: W3Techs March 2026; HTTP Archive 2024 Web Almanac CMS chapter (Figure 12.19), desktop medians; BuiltWith active site estimates.

1.2 Page Weight by Platform

Page weight is the primary driver of digital carbon emissions under the SWDM methodology. The platforms differ significantly:

• WordPress (2,252 KB) — the lightest of the three; plugin ecosystems and page builders can push real-world sites to 3–5 MB
• Wix (2,560 KB) — heavier than WordPress at median; the proprietary editor and closed platform add structural overhead
• Squarespace (3,323 KB) — the heaviest median by a wide margin; template-driven design with heavy asset loading

All three are far above the 400 KB target achievable with a well-optimized Anglesite static site.

1.3 Green Hosting Status by Platform

SWDM v4 introduces a Green Hosting Factor (GHF) — a value from 0 to 1 representing the proportion of datacenter energy sourced from verified renewable electricity. The three platforms have materially different profiles:

Wix benefits from Google Cloud’s renewable energy matching, which earns a higher GHF than unverified shared hosting — but stops short of GWF verification. Squarespace and typical WordPress shared hosting are treated equivalently at 0.10.

2. Methodology

2.1 The Sustainable Web Design Model (SWDM v4)

All calculations use Version 4 of the Sustainable Web Design Model, released July 2024 and implemented in the Green Web Foundation’s CO2.js library. SWDM v4 uses data transfer as a proxy for total resource usage and models four system segments:

Carbon conversion uses the global average grid intensity of 494 gCO₂e/kWh (Ember annual global electricity review).

2.2 Formula

Where:

• 0.27 kWh/GB is the SWDM v4 total system energy factor
• 0.85 represents the non-datacenter segments (unaffected by hosting choice)
• 0.15 isolates the datacenter segment (scaled by GHF)

Only the datacenter segment is adjusted by the Green Hosting Factor. All other segments scale proportionally with page weight — making page weight reduction the dominant lever.

2.3 Inputs

2.4 Conservative Assumptions

Every modeling choice is intentionally conservative:

• Page weight baselines use HTTP Archive desktop medians — many real-world sites are heavier
• Server-side compute savings (PHP execution, Wix’s SSR pipeline, Squarespace’s dynamic rendering) are not modeled
• CDN edge routing efficiency (shorter last-mile paths via Cloudflare’s 300+ PoPs) is not modeled
• Browser caching benefits for repeat visitors are not modeled
• SWDM v4 is designed to overestimate at broad system boundaries; the authors consider this an acceptable conservative trade-off

Real-world savings are likely higher than the figures presented here.

3. Per-Site Savings by Platform

3.1 Per-Visit Emissions

3.2 Annual Savings by Traffic Level

From WordPress

From Wix

From Squarespace

3.3 Platform-Specific Notes

WordPress is the lightest of the three but carries the same unverified hosting penalty as Squarespace. The 85% reduction is driven almost entirely by page weight. Plugin ecosystems (Elementor, WPBakery, Yoast, WooCommerce) routinely inflate real-world WordPress pages well above the 2,252 KB median; individual site savings may exceed these estimates.

Wix runs on Google Cloud’s renewable infrastructure, earning a moderately better GHF of 0.50. This partially offsets the datacenter segment — but because the datacenter is only 15% of total system energy, the practical difference from unverified hosting is modest. The dominant saving still comes from page weight reduction. Wix’s closed platform also generates extra JavaScript and proprietary rendering overhead not fully captured in page weight alone.

Squarespace is the most compelling migration target. The combination of the heaviest page weight (3,323 KB) and an unverified hosting factor produces per-visit emissions nearly 10× the Anglesite baseline. A 1,000 visits/month Squarespace site avoids 4.69 kg CO₂e per year — more than any other platform at the same traffic level. Squarespace’s locked platform and no published sustainability commitments make it the clearest case for migration.

4. What Drives the Savings

The 85–90% reduction comes from two compounding factors:

1. Page weight reduction (~80% of total savings) Serving pre-built static HTML, CSS, and JS in place of server-rendered content reduces bytes transferred across every system segment simultaneously. Device energy (52%), network energy (14%), and embodied hardware (19%) all scale with data transfer — totaling 85% of system emissions affected by page weight alone.

2. Green hosting verification (~5–10% of total savings) Moving from GHF 0.10 → 1.00 eliminates the datacenter segment (15% of total). This is real and meaningful, but secondary to page weight. Green hosting marketing that leads with hosting rather than page weight is overstating the most controllable lever.

3. Unmodeled savings (additional)

• PHP/MySQL compute elimination: static hosting has near-zero server compute
• CDN edge routing: Cloudflare’s 300+ PoPs materially shorten average network paths
• Browser caching: repeat visitors may transfer zero bytes for cached resources

5. Aggregate Potential

5.1 Addressable Market

Not all sites on these platforms can migrate to static hosting. E-commerce, membership, and heavily dynamic sites require server-side capabilities. The conservative migratable fractions:

5.2 Conservative Aggregate Estimate

Using a median of 300 visits/month (reflecting the low-traffic long tail of the SMB web):

5.3 Moderate Estimate (1,000 visits/month median)

5.4 Context

The credible mid-range: 29,000 to 81,000 tonnes CO₂e per year across all three platforms.

These numbers are honest and appropriately scoped. They should not be overstated. If server-side compute elimination were modeled, estimates would likely double.

6. How Anglesite Delivers These Savings

The migration friction — not the technology — is why millions of migratable sites remain on dynamic platforms. Anglesite removes that barrier.

Static output by default. Astro-generated HTML, CSS, and JS. No runtime, no database, no PHP, no Wix rendering engine, no Squarespace template pipeline. Pages are files.

Built-in optimization. AVIF image generation, Brotli compression, semantic HTML, and minimal JavaScript are build-step defaults — not advanced configuration options.

Cloudflare Workers hosting. Static assets served from Cloudflare’s GWF-verified, globally distributed edge network. Free tier covers virtually all SMB traffic levels. Every Anglesite site is automatically listed in the GWF global directory and qualifies for the verified green badge.

Platform import. /anglesite:import migrates content from WordPress, Squarespace, Wix, and 20+ other platforms. Posts, images, and redirects come with you.

The 400 KB target is structural. Anglesite sites don’t reach 400 KB through discipline — they reach it because there’s no page builder runtime, no WordPress plugin stack, no Wix JS framework to ship. The architecture makes bloat opt-in rather than opt-out.

7. Methodology Notes and Limitations

Methodology landscape and model selection

Four established models exist for estimating website carbon emissions. We selected SWDM v4 as the primary methodology; the others are documented here for transparency.

Cross-validation: OneByte model

As a secondary check, we ran all calculations through the OneByte model (The Shift Project / Lean ICT), which applies narrower system boundaries (datacenter and network only) and does not model green hosting. Because it excludes user devices and embodied hardware — which represent 71% of SWDM’s total system energy — its absolute per-visit figures are roughly 75% lower. However, because those segments scale proportionally with page weight in both models, the relative savings are almost identical:

The 2–3 percentage point gap is explained by the green hosting factor: SWDM v4 credits Cloudflare’s GWF-verified renewable energy, which OneByte does not model. The savings claim of 82–90% holds across both methodologies. Notably, under OneByte, Wix loses the partial credit from Google Cloud’s renewable matching, converging toward the same reduction profile as the others — reinforcing that hosting choice, while meaningful, is secondary to page weight.

Model fidelity

SWDM is a model, not a measurement. Data transfer is a proxy for total resource consumption — a known simplification acknowledged by the model’s authors. Real-world energy use can only be measured with instrumentation at each system boundary.

The model overestimates by design. SWDM v4 applies broad system boundaries, which the Green Web Foundation expects to produce conservative (high) emissions estimates. Our numbers are likely overstating baseline emissions, which means the proportional savings are understated.

What is not modeled

• Server-side compute (PHP, Wix SSR, Squarespace dynamic rendering) — the most significant omission
• CDN routing efficiency — shorter paths via Cloudflare PoPs
• Browser caching — repeat visitors, zero additional transfer
• Embodied carbon differences between single-tenant shared hosting and Cloudflare’s massively multi-tenant edge

The Wix GHF caveat

Assigning Wix a GHF of 0.50 is a modeling judgment. Google Cloud purchases renewable energy to match 100% of consumption, but this is not verified through the GWF’s independent process. A conservative reader could argue for 0.10 (same as unverified hosts). A generous reader could argue for 0.80 (near-verified). We use 0.50 as a reasonable midpoint. This does not materially affect the headline savings figures, since hosting is only 15% of total system energy.

Why other platforms are excluded

Drupal (1,903 KB median, per HTTP Archive 2024) is lighter than WordPress but serves a developer audience outside Anglesite’s target market, and its market share is declining. Shopify runs on a Cloudflare-powered CDN and carries a meaningfully better green hosting profile than typical shared hosting — but e-commerce functionality is not replicable in a static architecture, so migration is not a viable option for the vast majority of Shopify sites. Webflow generates relatively lean output and targets designers rather than SMB owners; its market share is under 0.5%. Duda is primarily an agency/reseller platform with strong performance optimization baked in, making it an outlier in the CMS dataset rather than a representative SMB deployment. GoDaddy Website Builder page weight data is not cleanly separable from self-hosted WordPress on GoDaddy infrastructure in the HTTP Archive dataset, making it unreliable as a standalone figure. None of these exclusions affect the conclusions of this paper.

The ⅔ / 43% distinction

The frequently cited claim that “⅔ of websites run on WordPress” refers to WordPress’s share of websites using a detectable CMS (64%). Its share of all websites is 43%. This paper uses 43% and the 30M active site baseline for aggregate calculations — the more conservative and defensible foundation.

8. Supported Marketing Claims

Per-Site Claims

“Migrating from WordPress to Anglesite reduces your website’s carbon footprint by 85% — avoiding 1.5 to 30 kg CO₂e per year depending on your traffic.”

“Migrating from Wix to Anglesite reduces your website’s carbon footprint by 86% — avoiding 1.6 to 33 kg CO₂e per year depending on your traffic.”

“Migrating from Squarespace to Anglesite reduces your website’s carbon footprint by 90% — avoiding 2.3 to 47 kg CO₂e per year depending on your traffic.”

“Squarespace sites emit nearly 10× more carbon per visit than an equivalent Anglesite site.”

Aggregate Claims

“If every migratable small business site on WordPress, Wix, and Squarespace switched to static hosting, the web could eliminate 30,000–80,000 tonnes of CO₂e per year — equivalent to taking up to 18,000 cars off the road.”

What to Avoid

• Do not claim exact figures without citing traffic assumptions
• Do not lead with green hosting as the primary benefit — page weight is the dominant driver
• Do not cite the “⅔” figure without clarifying it refers to the CMS market, not all websites
• Do not apply the 90% Squarespace figure to WordPress migrations or vice versa

9. Sources and References

1. Sustainable Web Design Model v4 — sustainablewebdesign.org
2. Green Web Foundation: Understanding SWDM v4 — thegreenwebfoundation.org
3. CO2.js Methodology Documentation — developers.thegreenwebfoundation.org
4. Cloudflare: Green Hosting with Cloudflare Pages — blog.cloudflare.com
5. HTTP Archive 2024 Web Almanac: CMS Chapter (Figure 12.19) — almanac.httparchive.org
6. HTTP Archive 2024 Web Almanac: Page Weight Chapter — almanac.httparchive.org
7. W3Techs: WordPress Market Share — w3techs.com
8. Ember: Global Electricity Review — ember-energy.org
9. Website Carbon Calculator (SWDM v4 implementation) — websitecarbon.com
10. The Shift Project: Lean ICT Report (OneByte model source) — theshiftproject.org
11. BuiltWith: CMS Usage Statistics — trends.builtwith.com
12. Green Web Foundation: Green Web Check — thegreenwebfoundation.org