by Janus Boye
Gavin Colborne on stage in Aarhus at a past Boye conference
How do we create web pages from the lens of sustainability and how do we measure the carbon footprint of our digital presence?
At UK-based website governance vendor Little Forest, Managing Director Gavin Colborne and his team are working on a new open source project which will introduce a "Sustainability Score" for websites.
As he said in our recent member call:
“Similar to Google Lighthouse scores for accessibility, SEO and performance, the time has come to also be serious about sustainability as a digital leader.”
Below I’ve shared my notes from the call with more about his thinking on the upcoming initiative and also links to additional reading, so that when Google adds sustainability to Lighthouse, this will hopefully help you prepare.
Let’s do like Gavin and start with the problem.
Why are websites a sustainability problem?
Gavin opened with a pretty photo of a blue sky on a sunny day, where you could see the line-shaped clouds produced by aircraft engine exhaust.
While most people know that the airline industry is polluting, Gavin mentioned that the Internet is now at 9% of the world’s total energy consumption and 27% of the greenhouse gases are emitted by our electricity consumption.
As use of the Internet increases by approx. 25% per year, the carbon footprint is rapidly growing and we need to act. Putting things in perspective, we also learned in the call, that most of the energy is spent on either the hardware used to access the website or in actually creating the website.
As a final part of the problem, Gavin moved onto our everyday usage of the web: He mentioned that on average people scroll the equivalent of 229 metres per day on their screens. That is running 2 x marathons in a year on your thumbs and a big drain on the battery in your devices.
What can we do to improve our websites?
The clear advice was to focus on the big stuff first, which is video and images. Video is in particular a huge culprit, as it is about 60% of Internet traffic. Still, if you look beyond Netflix or Youtube, many corporate websites, marketing sites and sustainability subsites have a fancy video on autoplay.
Autoplay is just an extra carbon footprint and another example of additional loading of unnecessary resources is the infamous carousels that still reside on many corporate websites.
If you work to improve accessibility, performance and SEO, this will also help your website become more environmentally sustainable - see Gavin's simple message below.
A message that’s easy to remember: Good accessibility, good performance and good SEO also equals good sustainbility.
Gerry McGovern also contributed to the call and as a part of the Q&A, one of our members asked about fonts. Special fonts also require extra loading, but in the big picture, this will probably have a small impact, but like Gerry advised: If it’s easy to fix, then do it. It all counts.
In the call, Gavin also shared some solid advice via Birmingham-based design services firm Supercool:
Improve user experience, so people find the info they need without visiting half of your website
Lighten the load of your website - reduce image sizes, remove auto-play from videos, don’t use lots of font weights
Ask your web agency to clean up your code, and improve SEOs so users spend less time browsing
Adding to these, Gavin shared a few more tangible actions that will help make your website more sustainable:
Remove broken links
Remove unnecessary content from pages
Remove unnecessary pages from your sites
Remove unnecessary sites
Remove unused code
Moving behind the scenes, there’s naturally also the website hosting. Make sure to find a hosting provider that’s powered by renewable energy. According to the great and free service at Ecograder, choosing a web host that powers its servers with renewable energy can reduce your digital product or service's environmental impact by an estimated 15%.
Ecograder was initially launched in 2013 to help people better understand, track, manage and reduce their digital footprint. It looks at hosting, but also at your website to estimate your total website carbon emissions. Website Carbon Calculator is a somewhat similar service.
If you are designing a cloud service on Amazon, then Amazon Web Services has published Design principles for sustainability in the cloud as a part of their Sustainability Pillar in the AWS Well-Architected Framework.
Next steps to be more digitally sustainable
To quote Katie Perry from Supercool:
None of us can be perfectly 'green', but by listening, learning, and sharing ideas we can all do something to be more environmentally sustainable.
In the member call, Gavin suggested five steps for your environmentally sustainable digital leadership journey:
Sign the Sustainable Web Manifesto
Create a sustainability pledge for your organisation
Create a sustainability policy for your organisation
Optimise your website
Give a talk about your progress with sustainability
Here’s some of the additional great resources that Gavin also shared:
Sustainable Web Design - where you can read more about sustainable web design strategies
The Green Pages by BIMA (British Interactive Media Association) - a crowdsourced list of resources to help organisations and individuals understand, measure and reduce their carbon footprint
The Green Web Foundation develops tools and publishes open datasets to speed up the transition to run the Internet entirely on renewable energy.
Learn more about environmentally sustainable digital leadership
The connection between sustainability and digital is coming up more and more, but it was actually only less than a year ago that we first covered it on this blog, when UK-based James Cannings hosted a member call on building websites for environmental sustainability.
The Ecograder service is created by the Chicago-based team at Mightybytes and their founder Tim Frick.
Earlier this year, we’ve had two calls on the topic, which had a bit more focus on the hardware side:
Waste is the business case of big tech with Gerry McGovern
Introducing Circular Economy Version2 with Nick Gonios
Finally, you can also download the slides (PDF) or lean back and enjoy the recording.