Digital sustainability: most frequently asked questions

By Supercool

SUMMARY

In collaboration with Digital Carbon Online, the digital agency and arts sector specialists Supercool measured the carbon footprints of 66 cultural websites. Tracking nearly 9 million page visits over 3 months, they collated and analysed the data – and this first-of-its-kind report is the result of that work.

The report outlines some key trends, such as:

The cultural sector is better than some, but not the best when it comes to the carbon footprint of their websites
Homepages and Event pages account for 81% of page views, and they have the biggest environmental impact. So reducing these is a good place to start
Videos and images are making pages heavier, and therefore increasing the CO2e emissions. Reducing the use of video and optimising images will help reduce your website's carbon footprint.

During our AMA session, and in previous sessions where we’ve talked about digital sustainability, we often get similar questions. In this article, we’ll answer the most common questions, and we’ve provided lots of resources to help you too.

Aren’t websites loads better than paper and stuff? How do they even have a carbon footprint?

From the data centre where your website is stored, to the devices end-users are using, energy goes into making the devices (embodied energy), and energy is also used to transfer data from one point to the next along the network (operational energy). All of this energy has a carbon footprint.

Whilst a single page view has a very low carbon footprint (around 0.5g), the challenge with websites is that they have a large number of pages and page views. So this small amount quickly adds up.

The internet currently accounts for approximately 4-6% of global Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. And by 2040, with the addition of AI and technology developments, it’s expected the internet will account for 14% of GHG. That’s more than the entire transportation industry.

What’s the deal with green hosting?

Green hosting means your website is hosted in a data centre that’s powered by renewable energy. This is a great place to start if you want to reduce the negative impact of your website.

You can test whether your website is already hosted on a green server on these websites:

https://www.thegreenwebfoundation.org/

https://www.websitecarbon.com/

But, be careful! These websites don’t include all hosting services and it’s possible to add a Content Delivery Network (CDN) like Cloudflare in front of your website that’ll trick these tools into thinking your website is hosted on a green server.

If you want to be sure, check with your web developers.

Here’s an article that goes into some of the challenge switch green hosting: https://supercooldesign.co.uk/articles/the-mysteries-of-green-hosting

We’re a small team, what can we do?

Being a small team doesn’t mean you can’t make meaningful changes to your website to reduce the carbon footprint. You can start by leaning on your web developers and asking them a few simple questions:

Is our website hosted on a server powered by renewable energy?
Is our website using modern image formats like WebP?
Do you have any recommendations for what we could do to reduce the carbon footprint of our website?

From here you can make decisions about moving the website to a new hosting environment or updating the front end. Your web developers will likely just need the go ahead on these tasks, so it shouldn’t take up too much of your time.

You can also get in touch with Digital Carbon Online and ask for a free report. You can use this to compare your website with the benchmark report - this will help you know whether your website is already doing well, or whether it needs some work.

And if you have a bit more time, a content audit is an excellent way to do a big clear-out and reduce the overall amount of content you’re storing. You can use XML Sitemaps to generate a CSV of all your web pages. You can then run through this and choose which ones can be deleted. If you’ve never done a content audit, this Supercool Session with Georgina Brook takes you through a content audit step by step.

Should we get rid of images and videos from our website?

Not necessarily. Images and videos are a great marketing tool, especially for the cultural sector where so much of what you’re selling is an experience and often something that can’t be communicated in just words. However, you can think carefully about how you use images and videos.

By reducing the size of the images you upload to the website, you can significantly reduce the carbon footprint of pages. It’s worth keeping in mind that images taken with your mobile phone will often be pretty large, so rather than upload them directly to the website, resize them first.

You can also use modern web formats, like WebP. WebP compresses images so they transfer less data to end-users, reducing the energy needed.

You could choose to host your videos rather than embed them from services like YouTube or Vimeo. The benefit here is that you can control where they are stored, giving you the option to store them on renewable energy powered servers. However videos can take up a lot of space and delivering the content to users can use a lot of server capacity. So if you have a busy website, sticking with embedding videos is a better approach.

When it comes to videos, it’s about quality over quantity. Rather than have autoplay videos everywhere, consider whether the video is really working for you (you could put

tracking in place to test engagement). You can also consider “click to play” videos rather than autoplay.

How does this impact accessibility?

There are lots of accessibility benefits to improving the sustainability of your website. This includes things like:

Reducing the number of pages on the site, so content is easier to find
Improving the performance of the site, so it works better across devices and even on slower internet connections
Keeping information succinct and to the point
Reducing long copy and focusing on reading age

One area where accessibility and sustainability don’t go hand in hand is video content. Video content can be really helpful for users, especially when it’s related to visiting a venue or the programme. It’s important to note that reducing the carbon footprint of your website shouldn’t stop you from delivering your work, impacting communities and providing great experiences for people. In this case, accessibility comes first, and the environmental cost is ok (and can be offset if needed).

Our senior stakeholders don’t really care about this stuff, how do I get buy-in?

Digital sustainability is a tough topic for some people to get on board with. Most people just haven't really considered how their website could be impacting the planet. And when funding is tight and there are lots of other areas of the business that need improvements, the website can be last on the list.

There’s plenty that you can do without getting buy-in, such as reducing old content on the website, streamlining user journeys by combining multiple pages into fewer pages, and deleting old images from the site. A lot of this stuff can happen without lots of conversation or sign-off.

If you’re keen to make a case to stakeholders, take a look at Indigo’s Act Green Report which shows that audiences care about your impact on the planet - “50% of audiences expect you to make changes to the website to decrease its digital carbon footprint”