When values align
When values align with a client it can lead to great things! Dunnet Bay Distillers have always considered sustainability in their business model, it was only natural that this would extend to their website. We were delighted they agreed to a large project to review and improve their website carbon.
Weighing Up the Benefit
Dunnet Bay Distillers have a beautiful (even if I do say so myself) and high-converting e-commerce website which relies on their product’s exquisite design to convey the quality and give customers the confidence to purchase. While we wanted to reduce the carbon, it was also important that their brand still looked slick, their products shone and the website worked seamlessly.
The primary function of a website is to inform visitors about the business and, in this case, make sales. The rough essence of making a website low carbon is reducing the bytes flowing from the website server to the customer. To understand how low carbon we can make a website we have to consider each website’s ultimate task and ensure that it will be performing its primary function at least as well as it currently does.
How low (carbon) can they go?
As with all aspects of low-carbon living – it’s a matter of weighing up exactly how much carbon is necessary, making the savings where we can. In this instance, we were not going to remove the images or videos or remove the shopping functionality. Instead, we focused on the areas that we could reduce such as code and other optimisations. We knew from the outset that an A rating would be unrealistic and were curious about how much we could improve a highly functioning magazine-style e-commerce site.
Benefits of a low carbon review
The wonderful side effect of addressing website carbon is that it makes the website load faster! This is a win-win as this improves the user journey and improves sales conversions.
Our goals were
- Reduce the carbon
- Speed up the website
- Make improvements for the client on the backend of the website
The Results
We reduced the website’s carbon by 40%, moving from an F rating to a C rating in the carbon scoring tools.
We were able to streamline many of the processes on the website and improve the overall running of many site features. This graph shows the effect of the final changes made to the website and how it affected the carbon generated per page load.
Carbon Reduction After Theme Rollout
The carbon savings over the course of 1 year are likely to be the equivalent of:
- Boiling 21,358 cups of tea
- Charging a smartphone 34,278 times
Consulting on Low Carbon Web Development
From This Day are constantly evolving how best to develop low carbon websites, and are available should you want to improve or benchmark the carbon used on any of your websites! Contact Us to arrange a discovery call to see how we can help reduce your website carbon.
