Sustainable websites – putting it into action

Bringing our sustainable website blog series together and putting it all into action

In our blog series, Sustainable Websites, we’ve provided expertise and guidance on the importance of making your website sustainable, 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.

Each blog has provided actionable tips for marketers and sustainability experts to understand and put into place. By implementing the above changes in 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.

Train your team on image editing, digital housekeeping, content best practices
Emphasise the benefits to your site’s performance
Make a dashboard with 5 KPIs to see measurable and meaningful improvements and impacts
Review your brand guidelines for accessibility and sustainability.

Getting Technical

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, 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.

A systematic change

Changes needed by the design and development industry: At Pixeled Eggs, we’re part of several communities. We seek 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. However, only some agencies operate like this, those that don’t need to learn and care about the impact they make. 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 more accessible, perform better and don’t cost the earth. We’re seeing an increase in environrmental considerations in the briefs we receive, which is fantastic to see this change continuing.

How to drive that change:

“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 our CEO and Founder, Sepas Seraj on the Can Marketing Save the Planet sustainability Podcast Series here.