Skip to main content Skip to footer
Start a conversation

Making university WordPress sites greener

By

Universities talk a lot about sustainability, but their websites are often an overlooked part of the carbon story. Large, media-heavy sites that serve thousands of students, staff and alumni every day quietly consume a significant amount of energy.

The good news: you dont need a full rebuild to make meaningful improvements. With a few focused changes to how you run your WordPress site, you can reduce environmental impact and usually improve performance and user experience at the same time.

Why website sustainability matters in higher education

For universities, digital sustainability isnt just a technical concern:

  • Scale amplifies waste. A minor inefficiency on a small brochure site becomes a real problem when you have thousands of pages and a global audience.
  • Reputation and values. Many institutions make public net-zero commitments. Students and staff increasingly expect those values to be visible in digital decisions too.
  • Accessibility and equity. Lighter, faster pages are more usable on older devices and slower connections, which is particularly important for international and remote learners.

Seen through that lens, sustainable WordPress practice becomes part of delivering on your institutions mission, not just an IT nice-to-have.

Three quick wins for greener WordPress sites

You dont need to change everything at once. Here are three areas where higher-ed teams can usually make tangible improvements within a semester.

1. Tackle images and media first

On most university sites, images and video are responsible for the majority of page weight. Common patterns we see:

  • Hero images uploaded straight from cameras at multi-megabyte sizes
  • PDF prospectuses and brochures used where structured HTML pages would be more appropriate
  • Autoplaying background videos on pages where the story doesnt really need them

Practical steps you can take in WordPress:

  • Agree sensible maximum image dimensions and enforce them through your theme and editor patterns.
  • Use modern image formats and compression, ideally automated as part of the upload process.
  • Be selective with video if a still image plus clear copy would do the job, choose the lighter option.

2. Simplify bloated page templates

Over time, its easy for key page templates homepages, course finders, research overviews to accumulate extra sections, carousels and interactive elements. Each addition made sense at the time, but together they slow things down.

For a typical university site, we recommend a periodic template health check:

  • Identify which blocks and sections actually get engagement (analytics can help here).
  • Remove or simplify elements that add weight without adding value.
  • Use a small set of reusable patterns for common layouts instead of bespoke one-off designs.

In WordPress, this often means working with your digital team or agency to rationalise block patterns and ensure editors are encouraged towards leaner, more focused layouts.

3. Clean up old and orphaned content

Universities are prolific publishers. Over the years, content accumulates: legacy campaign pages, out-of-date event listings, news that no-one reads any more.

While each page might be small, collectively they:

  • Increase the size of your database and backups
  • Confuse visitors and make key journeys harder
  • Consume energy every time theyre crawled, indexed or served

A light-touch content lifecycle makes a difference:

  • Set expectations up front: not all content needs to live forever.
  • Use WordPress custom fields or taxonomies to track when content should be reviewed.
  • Give central teams simple reports showing whats outdated, then archive or consolidate low-value pages.

Making sustainability part of your publishing workflow

The most effective changes are those that become part of everyday practice, not a one-off clean-up. A few ways to embed sustainability into your existing workflows:

  • Add a small sustainability and performance check to your content review process alongside accessibility and brand checks.
  • Include guidance on image use, video and page length in your internal content guidelines and training.
  • Ask your WordPress partners to surface performance metrics in a way thats easy for non-technical teams to understand.

Framing these discussions in terms of student experience (will this page load quickly on a shared houses Wi-Fi?) often resonates more strongly than raw technical metrics.

How 10 Degrees can help

At 10 Degrees, we see sustainability, accessibility and performance as closely connected. When we work with universities, we typically:

  • Audit existing WordPress setups to identify quick sustainability and performance wins
  • Refine templates and patterns so new content is lighter and more consistent by default
  • Support central and departmental teams with training that links digital sustainability to day-to-day publishing decisions

If youre looking at how your university website can better reflect your sustainability commitments, starting with a focused review of media, templates and content lifecycle in WordPress is a practical, achievable first step.