Top 5 ways to improve the sustainability of your website
There is a common misconception that the internet is a ‘green industry’ simply because it doesn’t use paper. In fact, data centres are poised to become the biggest polluters of this century and emission levels now measure higher than the airline industry. In understanding the impact of pixels on the environment, we as designers and creators of this nervous system that is the internet, can better understand our role in making it as efficient, reliable and usable as possible.
Common ways of measuring environmental impact such as carbon footprint analysis can be too long and convoluted to be folded into a teams existing work processes. Products like the Adobe suite are now reaching nearly 30 years old, should we measure its entire impact since version 1.0? Instead, we can measure the effectiveness of a website by optimising the parts we can control, measure and improve.
Tim Frick, in Designing for Sustainability has put forward a framework that identifies the following key areas for improvement, Green hosting, findability, design & UX and web performance & optimisation. Mightybytes have also made an easy to use tool called Ecograder that analyses the content of your web page according to this framework and compiles a score. This score can then be treated as a benchmark, to be continually improved and iterated over time, a process that is key to quick, agile change.
1. Green hosting
Green hosting is one area where significant progress can be made quickly. Companies buy renewable energy to power their servers which can reduce or even negate their environmental impact. Whilst Apple, Google and Facebook have led the way in powering their data centres with renewable energy the industry is still unregulated and difficult to tell if it is just greenwashing.
Here are some of the things you can do right now to find a green host and learn more about what other companies are doing to address this.
- Check out Serving Green and The Green Web Foundation for updated information on green web hosting.
- Read Greenpeace’s click Click Clean Report. They are doing a great job at holding big organisations accountable and transparent whilst also crediting those organisation making big strides in this area.
2. Findability
By making information easier to find, we can reduce the amount of time people spend on a website and therefore reduce the energy consumed by our devices and servers. This can be achieved through using good search engine optimisation (SEO) practices and also by adding search to your site. Content should be clear and can be designed to help users make more sustainable choices like offering more sustainable shipping or highlighting more ethically produced products first.
Most importantly, knowing what is important to your users will help you trim waste and create content that meets specific needs. You can measure almost anything on a website, try Hubspot, Moz, or Google Trends to find out what content is working and what isn’t.
3. Design and UX
Design and UX are at the root of web sustainability. Helping users complete tasks in a streamlined way, removing potential distractions and minimising information overload, all this whilst designing enjoyable experiences for users. Designers should follow common UI patterns to help users navigate sites intuitively. They can also integrate accessibility into their workflow by using Stark, a Sketch plugin that simulates different colour blindness states to make sure your designs are readable by everyone. Take the opportunity to practice ethical UX by avoiding ‘Dark patterns’ that trick users into payments or handing over data. To learn more visit Dark patterns.org which aims to raise awareness and shame organisations still using these practices.
4. Web performance and optimisation
Leaner and faster loading pages means fewer resources needed to power devices and servers. Users also expect fast load times and studies have shown that they will leave sites and go to a competitors if it does not load within 2 seconds. An experiment to measure the impact of the ubiquitous social share buttons showed that pages will bloat from 80kb to 480kb and add an additional 64 requests from browser to server for web elements such as web pages and images (http requests). Some sites have chosen to take a lighter approach and added hyperlinks to their favourite social networks on content pages which has been just as effective. This approach is best seen on Susty, a website at its leanest and delivered in just 6kb, where todays average page size is nearing 2300kb (2.3mb), making it 393 smaller.
5. Benchmarking
In order to know you are improving it is important to measure results and compare against the last time measurements were taken. Companies need to dedicate resources to these endeavours in amounts appropriate for the organisation otherwise initial efforts are wasted and improvements minimal.
This process draws many parallels with Agile and iterative design strategies. Whilst these practices are embedded in digital design and software development, the link is not always clear in regards to sustainability, but Ecograder can help pull these pieces together. Paste your url into the site and receive a score that identifies where you can improve across, Green hosting, findability, design & UX and web performance and optimisation. Sometimes slight changes can make a big difference and this will be reflected in your score the next time you use Ecograder to check your progress.
In learning that data centres and our approach to design are interlinked with the serious threat of climate change, there is real opportunity in change. Business must align with purpose as well as profits and in doing so embrace accountability, transparency, social responsibility and environmental stewardship. An increasing amount of businesses are embracing a more conscious approach and whilst only a segment of them currently consider digital as part of their environmental assessments they understand that impact and innovation work in tandem with business practices. To build a more sustainable web here are some of the things you can do right now:
- Take the B impact assessment, this rigorous criteria will light the path to becoming a more conscious company
- Work with companies like ClimateCare, TripZero, ThirdPartners, 3Degress and so on to offset your emissions
- As a consumer, buy more products and services from these conscious /conscientious companies
- Engage you co-workers and or employees in the above activities.
And finally, the purpose of this article is not to make us feel guilty, or suggest we use the internet less, it will always use resources and may never be truly sustainable. We can just do our best to acknowledge the interconnectedness of the internet to planet and people and in doing so, recognise that it is in our power to make more informed decisions than we did yesterday.
This article has been adapted from Tim Frick’s, Designing for Sustainability: A Guide to Building Greener Digital Products and Services. He runs the Chicago based digital design agency, Mightybytes, where he and his team also developed the tool Ecograder.
