We’re excited to share our new Citizen Good website. We’ve chosen to redesign our site to reduce its environmental impact.
The environmental impact of websites
We know that people don’t often think about the environmental impact of digital technology – while they are busy streaming movies or keeping lots of tabs open whilst searching for something online. But it does have a big impact. The energy required to enable that activity all contributes towards CO2 emissions. According to Reset, digital emissions are the same as the entire airline industry! The carbon footprint of digital devices, the internet and systems supporting it account for 3.7% of global greenhouse emissions.
How we created a more sustainable website
In creating a more sustainable website, we have intentionally streamlined our content to simplify what we host. We have taken out an auto-playing video montage, which, whilst engaging to watch, used up a lot of bandwidth. We’ve also restricted the number of images that we use. We know there is more to do, but as a first step, we’re reassured that the site redesign has had a measurable impact already.
The old homepage was 8,489 KB in size, whereas it is now only 1,502 total KB – an 82% reduction. This results in a smaller carbon footprint each time someone visits the page, from 1.08g of CO2 per visit to 0.34g – 3 times less impact.
The biggest contributors to this reduced impact were:
- Moving our hosting to a more sustainability focused partner
- We have reduced the functionality of the site
- Simplifying the look and feel
How we will continue to reduce our digital footprint
We will continue to reduce Citizen Good’s digital footprint by using on-going measurement tool to track our impact. We’ll closely monitor how the new site performs and challenge ourselves on which images and content we really need to host permanently online.
We’re also starting to train the team on sustainable digital behaviours, so we can think about our approach holistically. We are starting to think about all the work we do online, not just how we continue to make a more sustainable website!