Sustainable websites tips, how to put it into action
How you can implement best practices to reduce your website’s carbon footprint.
Sustainable website tips, what does it entail?
In our sustainable website tips blog series, we’ve provided expertise and guidance on the importance of making reducing your websites carbon footprint, as well as some of our top recommendations and things to consider. Written over a period of time, the content is still relevant today and is regularly reviewed and updated.
Here’s what we’ve covered:
- Sustainable Websites – It’s time for action
- Sustainable websites tips – use images efficiently
- Sustainable website tips – carefully consider your choice of fonts
- Sustainable website tips – choose green hosting
- Sustainable website tips – get rid of autoplaying videos
- Sustainable websites tips – staying up to date
Each blog has provided actionable tips for marketers and sustainability experts to understand and put into place. By implementing the changes covered in this series into your website design and setup, your servers would be using renewable energy, and you’d be reducing data transfers and the energy used by your users’ devices.
What you can do with your internal teams
In addition to the tips in this series, it’s important to ensure that your web editors/site admins buy into and understand these tips and guidelines. Here’s some things to do with your internal teams:
- Train your team on image editing, digital housekeeping, content best practices
- Emphasise the benefits to your site’s performance
- Make a dashboard with five KPIs to see measurable and meaningful improvements and impacts
- Review your brand guidelines for accessibility and sustainability.
Getting technical website development best practice and sustainable website tips
The changes we have discussed focus on those you can implement when using your brand and creating and managing your content. However, there are also more technical things that you can discuss with your current website provider and ask them to consider sustainable web best practices as per those outlined in the W3C WSG (Web Sustainability Guidelines).
Check on a few things with your developer
- Use caching
- Minify code
- Reduce server requests
- Reduce the memory usage of your web pages
- Lazy load content
- Implement AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Explore and audit your UX and content
Streamline navigation, user experience (UX) and content so people find what they need quickly. Exploring a website is a good thing for some sites, but in most cases, getting users to the information they need quickly and efficiently is the best user experience and minimises energy consumption, ensuring your site is used effectively. In addition, if you look at most heatmap reports, there is a fold and people don’t scroll. So don’t create unnecessarily long pages with loads of content.
There are lots of agencies now where this is on their agenda, and they’re all trying to think about how to make the best possible sites that are lighter weight and perform better. Pick one of those guys, and that will start to drive a systematic change.
Sepas Seraj, CEO and Founder at Pixeled Eggs
Purpose-driven digital solutions a need for systematic change
Changes are needed by the design and development industry: At Pixeled Eggs, we’re part of several communities, from the B Corp movement, to Design Declares, Marketing Declares and The Better Business Act. These communities all strive to use business as a force for good, organisations and people who are acting in socially and environmentally responsible ways.
Pixeled Eggs seeks to champion good practices and advocate for our industry to do the right thing. We regularly engage with our peers and friends to amplify and learn from each other. We consider purpose-driven solutions in the sustainable and accessible websites we create, this ensures we support both people and planet in our website design and website development. However, only some agencies operate like this, those that don’t need to learn and care about the impact they make.
How to drive that change
As clients and marketers, you have the power to change that. You can question the choices of your designers and developers and demand sites that are built to last, are more accessible, perform better and don’t cost the earth. We’re seeing an increase in environmental considerations in the briefs we receive, which is fantastic to see this change continuing.
“In the context of our work, marketers can drive change by demanding it. Agencies will not change behaviour until their clients demand it, this needs to be driven by clients, and that’s the power they have to make it happen.”
Sepas Seraj, CEO and Founder at Pixeled Eggs. Quote taken from Can Marketing Save the Planet Sustainability Podcast Series.
We’ve combined all our content and information into our Pixeled Eggs Sustainable Websites Practical Tips, if you’d like a copy get in touch.
You can also listen to Sepas on the Can Marketing Save the Planet sustainability Podcast Series.
