Digital sustainability
2 min read
We are committed to improving the sustainability of our business and the digital products and services we provide.
We understand the impact that digital makes on the planet, and are conscious of making a difference wherever possible.
Alongside simple changes that we’ve been actioning for years, like aiming for a paperless office, (suddenly become much easier since working remotely), cycling to meetings, car sharing when practical and turning the lights off during the day, there are a host of other more digitally focused areas we adopt to improve sustainability.
Sustainable website hosting
We use hosting partners that share our commitment to sustainability;
Amazon Web Services – AWS aim to run on 100% sustainable energy by 2025. Read more about the sustainability of power and utilities at AWS.
Nimbus Hosting – Are already running on 100% sustainable energy and are actively finding new ways and means of improving the sustainability of their operations. Read more here.
Image and media optimisation
One of the largest burdens on web page load time and therefore energy consumption, is loading media including image, video, PDF, PPT and other heavy downloadable content.
As part of our clients CMS training, we highlight the importance of media optimisation for UX, SEO, cost and environmental purposes.
This post demonstrates how we use data to visualise the impact that optimising media can have on website hosting costs, and therefore sustainability.
https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6892010589053677568
User experience
Traditionally we’ve considered the average time on page statistic as a measurement of engagement. But there are always different angles to read your data.
Where a low time on page could suggest the page wasn’t engaging, relevant or successful, it could also mean it served its purpose quickly, or was the page that tipped the user into click the contact page and getting touch.
Regardless of how we read the stats, delivering a great UX should mean less time wasted looking for the right content and therefore a more sustainable site.
Clean code
Maintaining standards compliant code, harnessing the most performant scripts and avoiding technical debt are all baked into our development processes and build strategies.
We use what we call our decisions matrix to guide us to make carefully considered and appropriate choices, ultimately thinking about every angle including UX, speed/performance, maintainability, cost, time, SEO, usability and accessibility.
Caching
We employ the latest caching technologies to more efficiently serve sites to users. Most of our sites use either Cloudflare, Cloudfront or Stackpath CDN services which each provides advanced caching features.
Caching effectively helps to minimise data transfer from server to user.
Check back soon for updates.
