Stripping your website back to the absolute essentials not only reduces its carbon footprint, it boosts key performance metrics such as speed, accessibility and SEO.
Remember to optimise rather than compromise, here's how:
Digital SustainabilityBest practice for 2023
In life we can all get wasteful and our digital habits are no different.
This guide is designed to provide practical tips for reducing your digital footprint.
One thing we want you to take away from this, is to ask yourself this question:
Can I do this in a more sustainable way?
What, no downloadable PDF?Find out why here
Digital Sustainability best practice for 2023
Web
- Strip out the unnecessary Avoid those full screen stock images and anything that's purely decoration. Focus on purpose and ask yourself what value your content is adding.
- Resize and compress your images Avoid uploading 4000 pixel wide images when they are only being displayed at 400 pixels. There are plenty of tools online for editing and compression, plus tools you can plugin directly to your CMS.
- Limit video, especially full screen autoplaying Video can be really affective but super heavy. Consider keeping videos to a minimum and compress what you do show. YouTube and Vimeo are great services for hosting video as they are set up for optimal performance and speed.
- Delete old files It can be easy to keep uploaded files and images on a web server that never get used again. Clear your web server of those old PDFs, product images etc on a regular basis and keep storage to a minimum.
Did you know?
There are an estimated 2 Billion websites on the internet. If we could save just a few megabytes per site it would be a significant amount of data and carbon reduction.
Digital Sustainability best practice for 2023
With nearly 320 Billion emails sent daily, we could all do with cutting down quite a bit.
- Send less emails
- Limit how many emails are 'reply all'
- Limit the number of attachments, find alternatives where possible
- Clear that inbox. No one needs an email from 2017
Did you know?
The average size of an email is between 60 - 75 KB. At the lower end, that's a whopping 19,200 Terabytes of data transfer per day.
So by holding back on that 'reply-all' email just to say thanks, you could help reduce this ridiculously high data consumption.
Digital Sustainability best practice for 2023
Files
It's predicted that by 2025 there will be a Trillion Gigabytes* stored on the cloud. That's a lot of power-hungry servers.
We need to reduce this demand on data centres and here's how:
- Delete any unwanted files (reduce how much you archive)
- Using shared documents will reduce the amount of unnecessary duplicates
- Find different ways to present information Slide shows and large PDFs aren't always the best solution.
- Compress files where possible, especially if you have to send them. Most files will have additional data in them that generally won't be needed, removing this can bring the files size down.
Did you know?
It's predicted that by 2025 there will be a Trillion Gigabytes* stored on the cloud. That's a lot of power hungry servers.
*Prediction from Cloudwards.net
Digital Sustainability best practice for 2023
Photos
We all know the internet is full of cat pictures and selfies. That's not likely to change anytime soon.
But… we can all agree there's no need to keep the 20 versions of that selfie that weren't uploaded to instagram. Here's some ways we can be more responsible with our 'photography':
- Take less. Simple but effective. It's an obvious one, but we could be more careful and more selective when taking photos.
- Delete them more regularly Running through your photos once a month to clear out those photos or memes you don't really need would help to reduce the amount of data we store on our devices and burden the cloud with.
- Share less Consider how many images get shared on long email chains and more commonly now in WhatsApp groups. All this data adds up and probably gets sent to many more people that it needs to.
Did you know?
In 2010, it was estimated that there were about 1.3 billion cat pictures on the internet. Today, that number is expected to be more than 6.5 billion. (Source PureStorage)
Digital Sustainability best practice for 2023
Video Calls
The world changed and video calls have become an integral part of our professional and personal lives.
Whilst there are benefits to reducing travel and having virtual meeting spaces, we can still be considerate of the time we spend on video calls. Here's how:
- Have less calls. It's an obvious one, but it's maybe too easy sometimes to jump on a call without thinking if an email or phone call would be enough.
- Invite only essential people (same as a normal meeting) If people are in the meeting but not contributing, consider saving that data and not have them on the call.
- Limit the time you need Rather than an hour, bring it down to 30 minutes and aim to be punctual and productive. It's easy to get chatting and double the time needed and therefore double the footprint.
- Reduce the amount of video, switch to audio only if you can. Try having video on for the first 5 minutes for introductions and niceties, then switch to audio only.
Did you know?
According to Forbes, turning off your camera in video calls could cut carbon emissions by 96%
Digital Sustainability best practice for 2023
Get in touch
You can start implementing these right away, but if you're looking for more comprehensive changes, streamline your business and reduce your footprint at the same time, we're here to help.
- Get monthly consultation and digital guidance
- Carry out a website audit and get a personalised action plan
- Book in a group workshop for your team to get on board
- Talk to us about the bigger picture
Book a discovery call
Or email the [email protected]
No downloadable PDFHere's why.
In true fashion, we challenged the norm and asked the question, can we do the typical 'Guide to' document in a more sustainable way. Yes. We can.
If we exported this content as a PDF the file would have been 216kb.
216 KB isn't massive. But this webpage is 2kb. Plus it's updatable.
So it's 1% of the footprint of the PDF and we can keep it fresh. Winning.