The digital carbon footprint of a person, organization or company can be quite large. Why is that? And how can you reduce it? In this article, you’ll find 15 tips for cleaning up your email, website and cloud sustainably.
Nowadays, more and more people are aware of their digital energy consumption. Yet not everyone knows how big their digital carbon footprint is.
What is a digital ecological footprint?
Every digital activity requires electricity. Think: sending an e-mail, charging your smartphone, editing your photos, storing your documents in the cloud, banking online, scrolling across your social media timeline, editing something on your website, and so on.
Not only your laptop and phone consume power, but also your cloud, emails or website are on a server that runs on electricity. And this is an important point: the more files you have on your website or in your cloud, the more energy it takes to keep your photos and documents online. The same goes for your emails and for what’s on your website.
Is a digital ecological footprint a problem?
No, not in itself. Because more and more servers are running on green energy. For example, nowadays you have more and more hosting parties that choose servers that run on green electricity, such as Combell.
It can become problematic, though, if you leave many unused files in your mail program or cloud or on your website. That way, you unknowingly—by accident—create a much larger digital carbon footprint. To raise this awareness, environmental organization Let’s Do It World organizes the annual Digital Cleanup Day. In 2026, that day falls on Saturday, March 21. Besides this day, actually any day is a good day to sweep through your online files.
How can you reduce your digital ecological footprint?
This is something you can do in a simple way: you go through all your emails, your website backend, your cloud and your AI tools critically. Below you can find suggestions for concrete actions.
Here’s how to clean up your email sustainably: 5 tips for a smaller digital footprint
Whether you use an e-mail program or a Web server, the following actions can already make a big difference:
1. Delete old emails: do you no longer need certain messages? Feel free to remove them. Please note: in the European Union, it is recommended that business and official emails be retained for 5 to 7 years in some cases. Want to know your exact retention period? If so, check with a legal specialist.
2. Delete out-of-office emails: everyone goes on vacation at some point and then sets up an automatic out-of-office message. Mail programs often save such messages as well. You already create a lot of space in your mailbox by deleting your own out-of-office mails. Thus, you are already going to use less energy.
3. Customize e-mail signature: are you an entrepreneur? Chances are you have an email signature. Very professional to include a logo or photo, but make sure it is optimized and lightweight. Is it heavier than 50 KB? Time to shrink the file, preferably even below 25 KB. This ensures that in the future you will have more space on your server and use less energy.
4. Delete heavy attachments: you can also consider this, but also keep in mind the official retention period.
5. Unsubscribe from newsletters: receive a lot of newsletters you don’t read? Time to unsubscribe!
Clean up your WordPress website sustainably in three steps
As a business owner, you may have a website. But before you know it, it’s very large because of all those images, pages, photos and other files you no longer use. You can easily get started with this as well:
1. Delete unused pages: do you still have pages from services you no longer offer? Delete them because they are no longer relevant. A tip: set a 301 redirection before deleting them. For WordPress users: this can be done through the free plugin Redirection. This way you make sure that your visitors, who go to your deleted page, are redirected to another page, such as your homepage. This will prevent search engines like Google or Ecosia from penalizing you, as the search engine algorithm sometimes tends to penalize websites where pages disappear. So via a redirection, you can prevent this.
2. Delete non-relevant blogs (“death of content strategy”): has your company changed direction? Then you might have irrelevant blogs about services you no longer offer. You may want to consider removing them. Tip: Again, use the redirection mentioned earlier.
3. Clean up the media library: delete a photo on the front end of your WordPress site? Then you don’t see it anymore, but it’s still in your media library. If you really want to delete photos, do so in the media library. The same goes for PDFs and other media files. Take a critical look at your media library: with any luck, you can delete hundreds of files. Not only better for the environment, but also good for the loading speed of your site!
Want to know more about deleting files in bulk from your website? Learn how to remove dozens of files from your website at once!
Go through your cloud with the digital broom: 3 tips to delete unnecessary files
Many businesses and private individuals use a cloud, which often consumes a lot of energy. The examples below also apply to other clouds:
1. Clean up your media gallery: look in your cloud at the photos folder. Old photos, which you no longer need, can be deleted. Failed photos too. You may even have copies of media files, which is another reason to delete them. By the way, think not only about your photos, but also your videos, audio files, gifs, stickers and documents. Overflow folder by folder critical. Done removing? Then go to the trash and delete everything permanently. Before you know it, your cloud is a few gigabytes lighter!
2. Delete old backups: through Google, you can have some devices backed up. Super convenient, but what if you also have that from a phone you no longer use? Just delete it because this will also save you several GB.
3. Replacing your cloud with hard drives: for example, are you a professional photographer? Then ask yourself if you really need a cloud for your RAW files and high-resolution files. Maybe it’s more environmentally friendly to put it on external hard drives the old-fashioned way anyway. If you make that move, make sure you have multiple backups of your hard drives.
Did you know that sustainable websites actually exist? Find out how tomake your own website more sustainable.
Additional sustainability tips: deleting chats and alternatives to ChatGPT, Google Search and Google Analytics
You can do a lot more. How about this?
1. Delete old chats in ChatGPT: are you using ChatGPT? Perhaps there are still old chats in there that you no longer need. Do you want to delete them? Click the menu icon (three dots) in the chat overview and click delete.
2. Replacing ChatGPT with Le Chat: looking for an eco-friendly alternative to ChatGPT? Consider Le Chat from Mistral AI, the European, sustainable and privacy-friendly alternative to ChatGPT. Read how to get started with Le Chat here.
3. Google Search replaced by Ecosia: you search and Ecosia plants trees. Sounds good right? Take care of the environment and set Ecosia as the default search engine in your browsers. Find out all about green search engine Ecosia here.
4. Replace Google Analytics with Burst Statistics: do you have a WordPress website? Ask yourself if you need Google Analytics and replace it with Burst Statistics, a European, privacy-friendly and sustainable alternative. See if Burst Statistics is for you here.
5. Delete old chats in WhatsApp, Signal, Messenger and Instagram Chat: Are your messaging services full of old conversations you no longer need? Delete them.
Did you know that sustainable websites actually exist? Find out how tomake your own website more sustainable.
Conclusion
Many entrepreneurs leave an ecological footprint digitally. Still, you certainly don’t have to keep everything. Emails, files on your website and things in the cloud can certainly be critically scrutinized and deleted on a regular basis. This way you need less space on a server and therefore less energy to keep your redundant files online! And how about looking for sustainable, privacy-friendly and European alternatives to ChatGPT, Google Search and Google Analytics? Try it for yourself!
Article updated February 18, 2026.