Sustainability
Our passion for sustainability comes from a desire to make a positive difference to the planet in everything we do.
Sustainable Website Creation
A website uses energy and produces carbon emissions, just like all the technology and devices we rely on. Each element of a website, from images to code, demands electricity for data processing and storage.
Website usage contributes to climate change and global warming. We believe that website creators have a duty to reduce the environmental impact of their work and play their part in solving the climate crisis.
We take our responsibility to protect our planet very seriously and adopt more sustainable practices wherever we can. Before we launch any website, it has to pass an industry-standard carbon footprint test to ensure it meets strict standards.
How we create more sustainable websites
Our websites are built using WordPress, paired with the use of the Elementor page builder and Hello Elementor theme. This combination provides a lightweight yet flexible and efficient foundation, resulting in less code and ultimately reducing the overall website size and resulting server load.
We use a variety of tools to fully optimise WordPress websites. As every website is bespoke, we apply a unique set of tactics to best optimise each one. JavaScript, CSS, images and even fonts are compressed while retaining functionality and appearance. We work hard to apply our significant skills and experience in a way that not only ensures a faster experience for your website visitors, but also better performance in Google.
We ensure that hosting providers we partner with use renewable energy sources for their data centres. This strategy both reduces carbon footprint and provides fast loading speeds for our websites.
Our websites use minimal, efficient methods. The incorporation of properly compressed images and videos, and reduced use of unnecessary features, can help lessen data transfer requirements and energy consumption.
In 2016, Google began crawling mobile versions of websites first, before other sizes, prioritising the mobile experience above all. In acknowledgement of this, we ensure the websites we create work well across all devices and have specific optimisations focused on the mobile experience. In general, mobile devices consume less power than desktops and laptops, and so focusing on mobile designs also promotes sustainability best practice.
A CDN is a distribution of servers that store certain content on a server near to the location of your website visitors. Put simply, they reduce the distance your website information has to travel. They can store HTML, JavaScript, CSS, images and videos. By using a CDN, we reduce slow response times or ‘latency’ and lower the energy required to transmit data across long distances, reducing the amount of carbon emitted per website visit.
As well as reducing the original size and resolution of images before they’re uploaded to a website, we can go a step further and convert them into WebP format once they’re uploaded. This greatly reduces file sizes while maintaining the image’s quality and can greatly impact the overall size of a website and therefore the amount of storage space required.
We recognise that we have a responsibility to the environment beyond legal and regulatory requirements. We follow the principles of the Green Web Foundation and are committed to reducing our environmental impact and continually improving our environmental performance. This is an integral part of our business strategy and operating methods, with regular review points.
All employees have a responsibility in their daily duties, to ensure that the aims and objectives of our environmental policy are met. We take steps both internally and externally to show our commitment to reducing our environmental impact.
This includes small actions we can all do to make a difference every day:
- Recycling office waste
- Switching off our PCs at the end of the day
- Only printing when absolutely necessary
- Sending out digital versions of all our proposals, quotes and client documents
- Online billing
- Only switching the lights on in the office when we need to
- Setting an automatic deletion date for emails to reduce cloud storage requirements
- Opting for 'dark mode' across various applications to reduce the power used by our screens.
Carbon offsetting with Ecologi
In 2023, we decided to take our commitment to sustainability even further, and with the help of Ecologi, began our journey of planting trees and funding community and renewable energy projects around the world.
Each month we plant trees around the world and in the UK for each team member in the office. We additionally plant a tree in the UK for every new website we launch and are able to show our client a picture and the exact location of the tree we have planted on their behalf. Our growing forest and our impact on international sustainability projects can be seen at any time. Take a look.
