Top tips for building a sustainable website


By Richard Dixon

 


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Sustainable web design is increasingly rising up the corporate agenda, although today few organisations have the process or activities in place for a carbon neutral website.

In effect it means a hybrid blend of environmental conservation principles and performance-based web and usability standards. These practices can be applied to the life cycle of any website, app, or online media to maximise efficiency, increase usability, and improve performance. Sustainable web design can also reduce the environmental impact of your digital products and services through green hosting, carbon measurement and reduction, minimising electricity use, and so on.

The practice of sustainable web design is commonly broken down into these categories:

  • Web Performance Optimisation: How quickly do assets download to a user’s device?
  • Content Findability: How quickly can users find the content they need? And how useful is that content once it’s found?
  • Usability: How quickly can all users accomplish tasks across devices and platforms at various bandwidth speeds?
  • Green Web Hosting: Are the servers hosting your digital products and services powered by renewable energy?

In practice, when we plan and design energy-efficient websites, we have these best practice principles in mind:

  • Optimise images to reduce file size – find the right balance between picture quality and screen size
  • Be strategic with videos.
  • Use lazy load for images and media – progressively load only what is in view, not the full page
  • Set up web caching – store information locally for quick retrieval rather than querying again (one of the benefits of our Cloudflare solution)
  • Delete what you don’t need – periodically remove unused media and content (achieved through our Digital Asset Management reporting and management processes)
  • Improve site navigation to make it easy to find information – and spend less time looking for it (which we achieve through ensuring all content is accessible in 3 clicks and in providing megamenu dropdowns)
  • Use a green web host – powered by renewable energy

In order to help clients get to a carbon neutral website, we would recommend that this is done through an official partner to ensure that full accreditation and verification is in.

This is a service we are about to launch to all our clients to give them the opportunity to achieve carbon neutrality.

Do get in touch with Naomi Hawkins, Head of Business Development, if you need support with your corporate website.



About Black Sun

Black Sun is a global group of strategic advisors, consultants and stakeholder engagement specialists. We believe that brands and businesses can have a big impact on our society  – they can shape more ethical practices, build more inclusive communities and deliver more sustainable performance. Ultimately, they can spark positive change in the world.

We partner with visionary companies to define and communicate their purpose, strategy and culture and bring to life their value creation story. Our services and solutions directly address the business-critical concerns of today;  best-practice disclosure and accountability through reporting;  protecting reputation and building trust with digital communications and helping businesses to effectively communicate their long-term responsibility and sustainability story.





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