# Green Web Service: lighter websites, credible environmental claims

## Make your website lighter. Make your green claims credible.

**Causeway Services · Green Web Service pilot · October 23, 2026**

A website shouldn't make people download unnecessary images, scripts, fonts, and tracking just to learn what you do. We help small organizations make their sites simpler, faster and less resource-demanding **without losing what visitors came for**. Then we help explain any verified improvements accurately.

You can buy the technical improvement, the communications work, or both. Environmental styling is a design service—not a substitute for measured environmental results.

### Choose the work you actually need

| Proposed service | Indicative pilot price | What you receive |
| --- | --- | --- |
| **Website resource audit** | **$149 once** | Up to three public page URLs, tested as actual reader tasks: request/transfer evidence, images and scripts, performance and accessibility checks, dated hosting verification, and a prioritized repair plan |
| **Image + page retrofit** | **$390 once** | Up to three agreed page templates and twelve authorized images, with suitable format/size alternatives, meaningful visual information preserved, before/after measurements and a rollback record |
| **Lightweight site build** | **From $950** | A scoped five-page brochure/editorial site, accessible semantic presentation, efficient images, practical publishing and hosting recommendations, source handover, and functional checks |
| **Green claims + identity** | **From $175** | A clear environmental story, appropriately designed visuals, source-backed claims, a dated evidence page and guidance on real third-party badges and eligibility |

These figures are **price hypotheses for a pilot discussion**, not binding quotes, a live checkout, guaranteed availability, or a claim that we have fulfilled a customer order. We can price other scopes after understanding the job.

### Try the free five-minute check first

Take your main customer page and ask:

1. **Can a person complete their task?** Find the hours, read the article, submit the form or buy the product, including by keyboard and on a small screen.
2. **What is the browser actually downloading?** Check the total transferred bytes, requests, large images and third-party scripts; note the date, device, network and cache conditions.
3. **What can be removed or replaced?** Compare correctly sized WebP/AVIF, an appropriately small PNG/SVG, or a dithered preview *when its lost color/detail does not matter*. Keep an accessible original where the information matters.
4. **Who hosts the site?** Check [Green Web Foundation](https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/green-web-check/) for the actual hostname, and record what the verification does—and does not—cover.
5. **What evidence supports the green claim?** If you cannot substantiate it, describe your improvement plan instead.

No signup or payment is required to do this check, and a sensible answer may be **don't rebuild this site**.

### Free worksheet: improve the visitor's outcome

Speed is one part of public Web performance. A fast page still needs to help the right person find you, understand your evidence and complete a useful action. Use this worksheet before choosing an audit or retrofit. It works for a small enterprise, a research organization or a community service. You can copy it into your own document; no account, upload or purchase is required.

**Start with one job:** “A prospective customer should be able to ___ on ___.” Name the page, intended reader, correct result and next action. Choose a task you can actually observe, such as finding a relevant project and preparing an inquiry. Record the present URL and revision before changing anything.

| Boundary | Record before the change | Choose a repair only from the evidence | Check afterward |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Find | The exact customer question, search surface, date, locale and returned URLs | Correct crawl restrictions, missing ordinary links, ambiguous identity or an unanswered useful question | Repeat the recorded query; keep absent, incorrect and inaccessible results separate |
| Understand | Ask a reader to explain what you offer and who it helps, without coaching | Replace an unclear introduction or task label with accurate customer language | A different reader can identify the offer and its limits |
| Trust | Can the reader find relevant work, sources, dates, responsible organization and correction/contact route? | Link real evidence close to the claim; correct unsupported claims | The reader can verify the important claim without guessing |
| Use | Complete the agreed task on mobile and desktop, with keyboard navigation | Repair the first broken interaction, unclear next step or inaccessible control | Repeat the entire task, including error, refusal and recovery paths |
| Load | Browser transfer bytes, requests, device/network/cache conditions and a trace | Remove or resize the specific blocking image, font, script or dependency | Repeat under the same conditions; preserve useful content and functionality |
| Continue | An observed inquiry, subscription, trial or purchase, with an eligible-visitor denominator where available | Improve a verified break between the page and its actual receiving service | Verify the recipient got the inquiry or usable result; distinguish clicks, orders and settled money |

For every row record **observed / failed / unknown / not applicable**, a source or trace, the person responsible, and the next action. An unavailable analytics account leaves conversion unknown. An HTTP 200 establishes a response; it does not establish a successful form, accessible page, indexed result or sale.

#### Keep the measures comparable

- **Loading and interaction:** where field data exist, use the [Core Web Vitals](https://web.dev/articles/vitals) at the 75th percentile, separately for mobile and desktop: LCP at most 2.5 seconds, INP at most 200 milliseconds, CLS at most 0.1. A single command-line request or lab run cannot establish these field results. Record the sample size and time window; insufficient field data remain unknown.
- **Accessibility:** select the applicable [WCAG 2.2](https://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG22/) requirements and actually test the task with keyboard and assistive technology. An automated scanner alone cannot establish whole-site conformance.
- **Discovery:** [Google's AI-feature guidance](https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features) says ordinary SEO remains relevant, with no additional special optimization required for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Check public HTML, ordinary links, crawl eligibility, canonical identity and useful evidence before buying a special “GEO” layer. Other answer services have their own observed behavior; keep their samples separate.
- **Marketing:** measure whether intended readers find, recognize and use the service. The [double-jeopardy research](https://doi.org/10.1177/002224299005400307) motivates testing availability and penetration; it does not establish that one site's copy change caused brand growth. Keep qualified visits, completed tasks, accepted inquiries, orders and net proceeds in distinct units. Record production and maintenance costs as well as gains.

Choose a no-change option, one bounded repair and a rollback condition. For example: if visitors cannot find the audit's scope, add a clearly labeled link to the existing service rather than commission a replacement site. If the task already works, keep it and investigate the next evidenced failure. A form that silently loses a submission fails even if the page became faster.

#### Worked first application: the 561 Group

We use this service on our own public presence. On **October 23, 2026, America/Chicago** (01:01 UTC on October 24), the Group's existing read-only public observer passed **13 of 13 HTTP and representation checks** for the apex, its work/projects/about/agent/contact routes, discovery files and canonical redirect. The public source-revision response identified `e8fc215472e9a5bd0d8bc1245817105fec1ee3d4`. This is a dated transport/source-claim baseline, not independently verified deployment metadata, reader acceptance, Core Web Vitals or increased sales.

The next observed defect was in our own service discovery: this Green Web page appeared in the publication source's menu but was missing from its homepage business decision table, Discovery JSON navigation and resource inventory. Its public URL returned **404** during the baseline check. The repair adds the missing source paths and this worksheet, then carries the accepted page through the existing publisher. Its release must be checked at those exact public resources; source edits alone do not show that visitors can use the repair. The next reader test is to find the free check from the homepage, use it for one actual page and identify a defensible next action without paying.

### What makes an improvement real

We agree on the visitor's task, the present site revision, its visual and accessibility requirements and the comparison conditions. We measure before and after against those same requirements. The handover distinguishes **actual observations** (such as browser transfer bytes and functioning controls) from **estimates** (such as modelled emissions), along with missing measurements and any new trade-offs.

[Low-tech Magazine's solar-powered website](https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2023/06/rebuilding-a-solar-powered-website/) is an important design benchmark, especially for modest static pages and palette-reduced images. Its 2023 redesign also shows why readers sometimes need the original image when dithering destroys detail. We aim to meet and then outperform it on *comparable customer tasks*, not claim untested superiority or force monochrome images onto scientific charts.

A smaller download alone doesn't prove a particular saving in electricity or CO₂e. Where data permit, estimates may use the [Green Web Foundation's CO2.js methodology](https://developers.thegreenwebfoundation.org/co2js/models/overview/); direct software-carbon accounting needs an appropriate functional unit and evidence under [ISO/IEC 21031:2024](https://www.iso.org/standard/86612.html). The [W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines](https://www.w3.org/TR/web-sustainability-guidelines/) are guidance, not a W3C certificate for the site. Hosting badges must be used only within the issuer's actual verified scope. Environmental statements should follow applicable law, including relevant [FTC Green Guides](https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/environmental-claims-summary-green-guides).

### Your audit or retrofit handover

The useful deliverable is a site decision you can act on and verify. Before work starts, name one visitor task, the current page revision and the person who will accept the result. A successful audit can recommend one repair, a larger separately scoped change, or keeping the current site.

| You provide | We would return within the agreed scope | You check |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Up to three public page URLs and one visitor task | A dated task walkthrough, observations and prioritized findings | Can a different person reproduce the important finding? |
| Required devices, content and accessibility needs | A comparison plan that preserves those requirements | Does the repaired version still communicate the information and support the task? |
| For a retrofit, rights to the selected templates and images | The agreed changed source/assets, a change list and rollback instructions | Can your maintainer identify and restore the exact change? |
| Available measurement evidence and its limitations | Before/after observations with comparable conditions and explicit unknowns | Does each performance or environmental claim stay within the measurement? |
| A named owner and acceptance window | A handover of outstanding issues, maintenance dependencies and agreed correction terms | Do you know who acts next if the task still fails? |

**Illustrative case:** a community workshop's home page downloads a large decorative image, while its opening hours are buried in an old announcement. The first repair might be a clear current-hours block and a smaller image. Acceptance checks that a visitor can find today's hours on a phone and with a keyboard, and then compares download evidence under the same conditions. A complete rebuild is justified only if the evidence shows that the smaller change cannot meet the job. This is an example of the method, not a claimed client result.

### Questions before choosing a service

#### Can my existing maintainer use the audit?

That should be a useful outcome. The audit identifies the observed problem, affected task, evidence and proposed correction so your own maintainer can assess it. Commissioning an audit does not commit you to our retrofit or hosting.

#### Will you make us rank in AI answers?

The work can improve useful content, ordinary discovery and the visitor's task. A quote cannot guarantee indexing, a particular search/answer result or a sale. The worksheet links the actual search guidance and asks you to record the query, surface, date and observed result.

#### Will a smaller site receive a green certification?

The handover can report measured resource differences and appropriately bounded estimates. Certification, hosting verification and environmental advertising claims each depend on their own evidence and applicable scope. A visual identity or smaller asset does not supply that evidence.

#### Is ongoing maintenance included?

The listed audit and retrofit are bounded pilot proposals. A written quote must state the included revision period and support contact. Recurring maintenance, publishing, monitoring, hosting charges and response times require a separate arrangement with confirmed capacity.

#### How do we know which price applies?

Begin with the task and evidence. The existing **$149 audit**, **$390 retrofit**, **from $950 five-page build** and **from $175 claims/identity** figures are discussion hypotheses for different scopes. An inquiry creates no order or reservation. A competent seller must confirm the final scope, rights, delivery window, fees and acceptance terms in writing.

The [guide to a useful next result](https://services.561.group/from-research-to-a-useful-result/) also covers researched customer explanations, machine services, learning and community work when a website change is not the next useful step.

### Get a scoped pilot quote

Send a **public website URL**, the **one thing a visitor must be able to do**, and your preferred service (audit / retrofit / new site / communications) to [emsenn@561.group](mailto:emsenn@561.group?subject=Green%20Web%20Service%20inquiry).

A preliminary inquiry is free, doesn't reserve capacity, and is not an order. Please do not email passwords, analytics containing personal information, payment details or unpublished customer records. We will not access accounts, change DNS or publish client material without appropriate permission.

A written, accepted quote must identify the actual seller, scope, practical delivery capacity, rights, timing, third-party costs, acceptance criteria, revisions, cancellation/refund terms and support. If the audit shows that the site already meets the task efficiently, recommending **no additional paid retrofit** is a successful professional answer.