Sustainable websites – tip #5 – staying up to date

How to stay up to speed with sustainable website design and development.

When I joined Pixeled Eggs, having worked as Head of Marketing at not-for-profit Digital Catapult, I thought I wasn’t as up-to-date on sustainable website best practices as I could have been. As a client, I focused on optimising goal-oriented, beautifully designed websites that served my users’ needs.

Through Pixeled Eggs’ content in the sustainable website blog series, our ways of working, and industry resources and tools, I quickly got up to speed. One of the main takeaways and learnings is that if we optimise for SEO and performance, we often create a sustainable, low-carbon footprint, light-weight website.

However, with all these sources, I was suddenly inundated with valuable information, tools and communities. In this blog, I aim to provide a curated list that will empower you with the tools and resources you need to stay up-to-date on sustainable website best practices. Plus, I will explain what they mean as a marketer or peer in the agency community.

Use green hosting

Whenever we get asked about the top priority for sustainable websites, our answer is always to use green hosting. It’s one of the quickest and most effective ways to tackle your website’s carbon footprint.

This means finding a hosting provider that uses renewable energy and has the infrastructure with efficiently built data centres and good carbon offsetting schemes.

We’ve found that moving clients who were not using this type of hosting provider improved their core web vitals and the way their website was serving search engines pretty quickly.

You can find out more and discover green hosting providers using The Green Web Foundation, an organisation that seeks to make the internet fossil-free.

There are an increasing number of providers, at Pixeled Eggs we use Kinsta. There’s also a fellow B Corp quite commonly used is Krystal.

Beyond hosting and off-setting it’s also important to work on reduction of your carbon impact.

Website carbon calculators

Website carbon calculators and tools are on the rise. These tools help you understand your website’s potential impact on the environment.

However, these measurements are quite complex. They provide a good indication, but they are not always 100% accurate. The outputs can be used as a snapshot of your carbon footprint and as a guide to making improvements.

The tools are regularly reviewed, and website carbon.com, in particular, updates its practices and processes regularly. Other tools and calculators include digitalbeacon.co and ecograder.com.

There are also paid-for tools such as digitalcarbon.online, similar to Google Analytics with an embedded code on your website, it calculates and monitors your environmental impact over time. The scans are done two to three times a month and give you a more accurate and regular view of your website carbon footprint. However, we’ve not got experience using this tool at Pixeled Eggs, and there are many free tools and ways to work sustainability into your reporting and web optimisations.

Google PageSpeed Insights

As mentioned at the start of this blog, a good way to approach the sustainability of your website is to make it tangible and based on performance. This also helps with your broader business buy-in, as you can present numbers and tangible results for the organisation.

Building and maintaining a well-performing website, considering load speeds and SEO performance metrics, actually leads to a more sustainable website.

Tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights provide an actionable report and audit of your site’s performance that you can work together with your web developer to implement.

SEO tools and analysis

When it comes to website speed and overall performance, SEO tools can provide valuable insights and tools to help measure your site’s general health.

With SEO analysis, it’s recommended to measure and optimise over time. Setting this into your analytics and digital audit process ensures your website is regularly assessed and improved.

Examples include SEMRush and SE Ranking. These tools measure technical performance, including website speed, which impacts SEO and the website’s size/impact on the environment. These tools are continually advancing, with Screaming Frog implementing a carbon footprint rating into its reports.

Use your web analytics effectively

If you don’t have access to or headspace to use SEO tools or other applications, consider your normal web analytics as one of the first steps. We recommend reviewing and regularly refining your web content and setting up regular digital housekeeping processes.

This can include removing redundant assets and pages that aren’t performing, reviewing content that isn’t serving your users or engaging them in the right way. This includes your media files, such as reducing and reviewing PDFs, out-of-date content, or duplicate imagery.

Tools include GA4 and Hotjar to provide in-depth analytics, engagement views, heatmaps, etc. How are users landing on your site? How do they engage and navigate when they get there? Use these tools to review, analyse and optimise.

Pledges and acts

When I entered the B Corp and purpose-driven world, I also discovered many pledges and acts. I could have signed up for them all, but I needed to take a considered and strategic approach. We can all sign a pledge, but we need to make sure we can take action on it and that it is relevant to our business and roles as marketers.

Examples include Marketing Declares relevant to our industry, which provides a list of recommendations, tools and ways of working. Also, check out #ChangeTheBrief a partnership between agencies and their clients to challenge the climate crisis and promote sustainability across all the channels we use. For my agency friends reading this check out Design Declares harnessing the tools of our industry to reimagine, rebuild and heal our world.

Sustainable web guides

Finally, and by no means least, there are now a number of sustainable web guides that are similar to the WCAG for accessibility. These guides are pretty technical in their setup, but they act as a guide and support, things to consider and reference. Run by communities, these are kept up to date and current.

There are two primary guides: the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG), as of August 2024 this is in it’s first draft and has created by the same community as the WCAG. As an interim and also further guide is the Web Environmental Sustainability Guidelines (WES Guidelines).

What is good to see is that the WES Guidelines acknowledge that they will be superseded once the WSG is complete but are set to provide an actional interim principles to go by. Perhaps less technical, the WES Guidelines feels easy understand and follow, while the WSG is very thorough with clear sections and actions. Both are useful references for you to discuss with your web agency to implement during design, build and optimisation sprints.

Approaching sustainable websites as a client

As a client, it was OK for me not to be as up-to-speed as I am now. That was the role of my digital agency. My biggest recommendation is to take the actions and information from the blog series to your organisation and agencies and work together to improve and optimise. Demand the change from your agency, include sustainable website design and development into your briefs.

If you’d like to talk to us about your website or our sustainability journey in general, please GET IN TOUCH!