Carbon Considerate Web Design
It has been an eyeopener for us to realise that green hosting (as great as it is) isn’t the full answer to making a website green. This week we’ve spent a lot of time reviewing many of our websites to benchmark them and see what improvements could be made.
Analysing our sites
An excellent tool from Eco Ping Earth allows you to analyse the carbon created by each page load. Running our sites through this tool has been both horrifying and motivating. Thankfully our existing good practice gives us a wee head start, but, there’s still lots of room to improve.
Our first Win!
I’m delighted to announce that I’ve managed to get our first website verified as a low carbon website by EcoPing.Earth.
Childrens Wood Creates only 1.55g Carbon Per Page Load –
EcoPing.Earth
Children’s Wood and Meadow – A Low Carbon Website 🙂
This lovely site for the Childrens Wood and Meadow uses a hand-coded WordPress theme based on the starter theme Understrap, with completely bespoke graphics. The site was built carefully and moderately and fully optimised. This light approach has allowed us to achieve a respectable carbon score. Heartening to think that if we knew then, what we know now, we could have even improved that further.
Unfortunately, it won’t be possible to retrofit all of our sites to a low carbon model but…
Our Next Developments
Armed with more knowledge on making low carbon websites, we will be looking to integrate these principles into our upcoming work. Keep your eyes peeled, with our eyes firmly on the prize we will be looking to get our carbon scores even lower!
