Abstract
Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 covers a wide range of recommendations for making websites and products more sustainable. Following these guidelines which utilize planetary, people, and prosperity (PPP) principles throughout the decision-making processes, you can minimize your environmental impact through a mixture of user-centered design, performant web development, renewable infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and (with metrics) various combinations of those mentioned. It should be noted that these guidelines will not address every possible mechanism or strategy to become sustainable, as such, these guidelines (which are notably Web orientated and focused) should be seen as a starting point in a sustainability journey (coverage does not extend for example to manufacturing or shipping of physical products). Following these guidelines will often make Web content more accessible, usable, and performant as a by-product.
To use these guidelines, it is highly recommended that you take a methodical approach. Rather than working through the entire document and broadly attempting to apply everything held within to your project or service, scroll through the table of contents to find a guideline that appeals to either your skill set or that you (based upon the impact / effort rating) feel comfortable in attempting to tackle. Sustainable change is measured in progress over perfection and by breaking down the specification into achievable goals based upon guidelines or even success criteria, you can more easily progress toward long-term targets. Guideline examples and resources may also provide implementation guidance while benefits can help justify their usage to management.
Status of This Document
This specification was published by the
Sustainable Web Design Community Group. It is not a W3C Standard nor is it
on the W3C Standards Track.
Please note that under the
W3C Community Contributor License Agreement (CLA)
there is a limited opt-out and other conditions apply.
Learn more about
W3C Community and Business Groups.
This document has been reviewed by Community Group members and interested parties. This is a draft document which may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than a work in progress. The Community Group's role in publishing is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment.
By publishing these guidelines, the Community Group does not expect that the work produced in this specification will affect the work undertaken by other W3C sustainability, accessibility, or performance groups. The Community Group will continue to track these Working Groups and Community Groups as appropriate. This specification closely aligns itself with the principles laid down for Web Platform Design [design-principles], Privacy [privacy-principles], the Ethical Web [ethical-web-principles], and Human Rights [HR-Spec].
To provide feedback regarding this specification, the preferred method is using GitHub. It is free to create a GitHub account to file issues. Comments received on the specification cannot result in changes to this version of the guidelines but may be addressed in errata or future versions of WSG. A list of issues filed as well as archives of previous mailing list public-sustyweb@w3.org (archive) discussions are publicly available. There is currently no preliminary interoperability or implementation report, however potential implementation strategies alongside filtering and categorization of guidelines are showcased within the Sustainable Web Design website.
GitHub Issues are preferred for
discussion of this specification.
This section is non-normative.
Plain language summary of Introduction
- The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSGs) promote good sustainability best practices based on the latest evidence and research.
- WSGs apply to applications, websites, and other Internet-related products and services.
- The guidelines feature Success Criteria you MUST comply with, and provide other features that can help with decision-making and implementation.
- Digital sustainability is a complex topic, so the best guidance may change over time, and other considerations (such as non-digital factors) should be taken into account.
In 1999, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG22] defined a set of baseline guidance for Web content developers and creators of authoring tools, with the primary goal of promoting Web accessibility through the adoption of inclusive strategies. Through a similar methodology, the Web Sustainability Guidelines promote planetary, people, and prosperity best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, website or application creators, product owners, stakeholders, tool authors, educators, and policymakers, with the primary goal of reducing harm to the wider ecosystem (regarding people and the planet) through sustainable strategy adoption.
For those unfamiliar with sustainability issues relating to the Web, consider that many variables [VARIABLES] may contribute to waste or emissions being produced online.
- The way data is sent or received between client and server.
- Hosting, environments, arrays, and infrastructure.
- Consumer devices, components, and variability in conditions.
- Software like Web browsers (rendering engines and code), operating systems, assistive tools, and applications.
- Human-centered design features include legislation, accessibility, and the vast field of usability.
- Development workflows, business operations, and tooling.
- The visitor's equipment, environment, and behavior.
Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) 1.0 is developed in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world. It does so intending to provide a shared strategy for Web sustainability that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. WSG 1.0 is designed to apply broadly to different existing Web technologies and to be testable with a combination of automated testing and human evaluation.
Web sustainability depends not only on sustainable websites and products but also on sustainable Web browsers and other user agents, examples include the performance of rendering and the accurate measuring of website energy use through developer tooling. Authoring tools also have an important role in Web sustainability, by ensuring performant code, reducing waste, and the results are served in the most sustainable way possible.
Significant challenges were encountered in finding existing research data to both identify and establish guidance for all the variables that affect Web sustainability, which came as no surprise with the subject being such an emerging and rapidly evolving field. Work will continue in this area in future versions of WSG.
The individuals and organizations that use WSG 1.0 vary widely and include Web designers and developers, policymakers, purchasing agents, teachers, and students. To meet the varying needs of this audience, several layers of guidance are provided including general guidelines, testable success criteria, impact and effort ratings, advisory potential benefits, documented examples, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ratings, evidence-based links, and category tags.
All of these layers of guidance (guidelines, success criteria, impact, effort, benefits, reporting, examples, resources, and tags) work together to provide guidance on how to make content more sustainable. Authors are encouraged to view and apply all layers that they can (relevance, time, or budget permitting), including the advisory techniques, to best make their product or service the most sustainable it can become. It should be considered that while great care has been taken to make these guidelines as well-rounded and feature-complete as possible, there will likely be additional tasks authors can perform to improve sustainability which this specification failed to address due to (for example) new techniques becoming available.
At the top are six principles that provide the foundation for Web Sustainability: clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient.
These guiding principles were chosen to act as the foundation of the WSGs on the basis that they opened the conversation as to what Web sustainability could and should mean for website or application creators and product owners attempting to make a change to benefit people and the planet.
While the primary focus of our guidelines is sustainability in the environmental impact sense, to avoid narrowing our definition, as with many frameworks this specification takes an PPP approach to sustainability. The benefit of this methodology is that while we do recognize the importance of energy / carbon accounting and reduction, we avoid carbon tunnel vision and seek to approach digital sustainability reductions through additional measures such as through the reduction of water waste and raw material conservation such as paper. We also are mindful of the social aspects of sustainability and the importance of people as well as the planet, thereby including important criteria, notes, and cross-links where appropriate to W3C work in accessibility, privacy, and other groups and including mentions of Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), ethical behavior, and other important disciplines.
Of course, principles on their own do not make for good testable guidelines, which is why our guidelines are as heavily evidence-weighted as possible, aligning with existing sustainability reporting frameworks and standards (such as GRI). We also have made every effort possible to map our work to comply with existing and upcoming worldwide regulatory frameworks to assist with compliance.
Under the principles are guidelines. These guidelines provide the basic goals that authors should work toward to make content more sustainable. The guidelines provide the framework and overall objectives to help authors understand the success criteria, which are testable against, to implement better digital solutions. This specification groups guidelines within four categories (User-Experience Design, Web Development, Infrastructure, Product and Business) that overarches various specialisms. It should, however, be noted that while many of these guidelines are curated into categories for simplicity, often they are not limited to a single group and can be utilized within other specialisms for a sustainability benefit. They also come equipped with tags that can be utilized by third-party user-agent tools to filter the criteria on journeys, categories, preferences, or additional variables to benefit the author during the implementation process.
These guidelines also come with both an impact and effort rating system. Whereas Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) uses A to AAA (or in the future, Bronze to Gold) as a measure of conformance against the entire specification, WSG 1.0 uses a simpler system of Low, Medium, or High ratings against each individual guideline to reduce the burden for individuals to identify quick wins or minimal implementations, from long-term benefits or heavy refactoring while encouraging a policy of progress over perfection.
Impact:
- Low
- Quick sustainability wins.
- Medium
- Noticeable sustainable impact.
- High
- Significant long-term benefit.
Effort:
- Low
- Minimal implementation.
- Medium
- Some changes are needed.
- High
- Heavy refactoring is required.
For each guideline, testable success criteria are provided. WSG 1.0 success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria is provided in separate documents or within third-party sources as cited evidence. Details regarding machine testability and whether human testing or intervention is required in order to meet a success criteria are indicated against each success criteria.
For each of the guidelines and success criteria in the WSG 1.0 document itself, the community group has also documented a wide variety of potential benefits. The benefits are informative and may potentially justify the scope for compliance with the specification. Examples (where possible) and Resources (third-party evidence-based links) are provided to allow authors to better address the guidelines through implementation and specific techniques.
Furthermore, for those requiring guidelines to be linked to a standardized methodology that can be used in reporting the digital sustainability conformance levels of a business, a section on GRI compliance is provided.
GRI Impact:
As with impact and effort ratings, a similar scoring methodology has been used within each rating section.
- Low
- This will have a minimal impact within a particular category.
- Medium
- This will have an impact worthy of consideration within a particular category.
- High
- This will have a considerable impact within a particular category.
Note
For this specification, an open source Jupyter Notebook was created. As an input, it takes a spreadsheet containing all the guidelines and (using low, medium, or high) their indicators of impact on the reduction of server resource usage, network transfer, and end-user device usage. Then it takes data from a GreenIT Report [FOOTPRINT] which estimates the environmental impact of the mentioned categories across material use, water use, energy use, and GHG emissions. It then combines these datasets and estimates the comparative impact of a given recommendation on different sections of GRI taxonomy.
It should be noted that the coverage of the Layers of Guidance, with particular emphasis on the impact and effort ratings, may be left open to interpretation, due to the broad and varying nature of how variables can benefit the wider ecosystem. For example, a guideline may have a low impact on preserving water but a high impact on preserving electricity. As such, the nature of benefits is nuanced and may require more in-depth analysis if authors wish to target specific environmental concerns such as water, paper, or mineral waste.
Currently, the Web Sustainability Guidelines use a crude metric of human assessment from subject-matter experts and a stated calculation and methodology underpinning the GRI reporting. However, future versions of the specification will seek to expand upon this, emphasizing metric-based calculations and proven datasets through measurability to identify emissions (and other) related targets.
It should also be noted that a drawback of the sustainability sector is that unlike other forms of measurement in other fields (such as web performance and accessibility) where binary conversations can occur (something either "is" or "is not" happening), there is unlikely to be a situation where a product or service is never emitting or causing some sort of impact upon the environment by nature of it existing. As such, implementors need to come to terms with the fact that the aim of the Web Sustainability Guidelines should be to firstly reduce what you can, then for what you cannot (as emissions will likely always occur to some extent) compensate for these continuous emissions to ensure as minimal a footprint as possible.
Note
Coverage should not be restricted to what falls within the digital sector. While for this specification we primarily focus on Internet-related technologies (and the people and businesses that use them), sustainability variables exist beyond the scope of this work and as such, the impacts of these differing areas of concern should be addressed when meeting targets, reporting, and complying with relevant legislation.
The WSG 1.0 document is designed to meet the needs of those who need a stable, referenceable technical specification. Other documents, called supporting documents, are based on this document and address other important purposes, including providing further techniques regarding implementation strategies, guiding authors through the guidelines that apply to their use case, and how WSG 1.0 would be applied to new technologies.
WSG 1.0 meets a set of requirements for WSG 1.0 which, in turn, inherit requirements from any prior versions. Requirements structure the overall framework of guidelines and ensure backward compatibility. The Community Group also used a less formal set of acceptance criteria for success criteria which is based on evidence-supported practices grouped by their impact and implementation upon the Web ecosystem. This allows for further expansion in future versions while maintaining a strict grouping of related (and overlapping) guidelines.
WSG 1.0 was initiated to improve Web Sustainability guidance. As no prior version exists, the initial draft was created through initial Community Group meetings, proposals (laid out in meeting minutes), and early draft guidelines were drawn up and refined, leading to the guidelines included in this version. The Community Group considers that WSG 1.0 incrementally advances Web Sustainability in numerous areas, but underscores that not all potential environmental improvements are met by these guidelines.
Product and user-experience designers are in a unique position. Not only do they often have the ability to dictate the visual aesthetic of a website or application, but they are often the champions of interfaces and the visitor experience.
Having this power gives those working in user-experience the ability to:
- Identify product and visitor needs (alongside impact), testing regularly.
- Structure the information architecture to improve ease of access.
- Ensure assets are suitable and of the lowest footprint required.
By adhering to the below guidelines, individuals can make a significant difference in the reduction of front-end sustainability impacts.
Plain language summary of User-Experience Design
- Identify and account for the issues affecting your service, visitors, and non-users.
- Keep the experience lightweight with well-written content and optimized assets with alternatives.
- Maintain a beneficial navigation system and layout using recognized (non-negative) patterns.
- Create, document, share, and use design systems to reduce duplication.
- Allow for accessible interaction and use forms only when necessary.
- Audit and test regularly in the project release calendar.
Many variables can impact the user-experience, and a bunch of these can impact how sustainable your website will be. Attempting to identify where you can make a difference to the visitor and give them a more sustainable experience will be beneficial.
Any negative external variables affecting a product or service are displayed in a publicly available resource, identifying where your product's sustainable impact can be diminished (systemic design).
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.1
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Clearly understanding a system's components can help a product team construct a plan to reduce emissions, especially from third-party services in an organization's supply chain.
- Privacy: Teams can better prioritize data privacy when they clearly understand a system's components, especially if they can identify potential risks to data protection.
- Social Equity: Teams can better prioritize social equity when they clearly understand a system's components. They must pay special attention to considerations from underrepresented groups, as these variables may not be well understood or covered in existing best practices.
- Accessibility: Teams can better prioritize accessibility when they clearly understand the components of a system. This is because they will understand their target audience and can identify improvements to make beyond basic inclusive design practices which could provide a well-rounded experience.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
A Systemic Design Toolkit (PDF).
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Ideation, Research, Compatibility, Performance, Hardware, Software, Networking, Reporting
When creating a product or service, identifying your target audience through user-research, analytics, data collected using ethical anonymous methods, or feedback from and with visitors is important in being able to create a customized service for and with them that is tailor-made for their specific preferences, adapted for any needs they may have, and particularly useful in helping a website or application evolve its service to meet sustainability targets.
Primary and secondary target visitors are identified, and their needs are defined through quantitative or qualitative research, testing, or analytics, ensuring your visitors and affected communities remain a close part of the research and testing process.
Potential visitor constraints like the device age, operating system version, browser, and connection speeds are accounted for when designing user-experiences.
The team has researched and identified whether a technical, material, or human constraint might require an adapted version of the product or service that reduces barriers or improves access to content.
Barriers to access (pain points or dark / deceptive design patterns) have been identified in the user-research with visitors for removal.
All stakeholders including your visitors have been assigned an equitable role in the decision-making process when undertaking research, identifying needs, or conducting iterative design work.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.2
- Medium
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: Undertaking analytics or research allows you to customize your product or service based on the needs of your visitor. The benefits of this are that emissions will be reduced due to an experience not making assumptions or developing unnecessary features (wasting resources), and being more specific about how you might reduce a product or service's environmental impact.
- Privacy: Assessing the needs of visitors will help you comply with privacy laws like GDPR, and anonymous analytics alongside test data can also be used to improve privacy.
- Social Equity: Improved user-experience often means products or services work better for visitors on older devices, in low-bandwidth environments, those with older devices, those in restrictive countries, those who speak different languages, and those with other potential barriers to accessing content. This reduces emissions as less e-waste will be produced if the need for newer equipment becomes less of a priority.
- Accessibility: Understanding the needs of your visitors through accessibility and trauma-informed research will help you prioritize which inclusive design improvements need to be implemented to enhance an already accessible product or service.
- Performance: Identifying what visitors require through research and analytics will reduce the potential for technical debt along the product's lifespan, which will help reduce emissions as developers will spend less time building a product with unnecessary features. It can also be used to identify bottlenecks in the user-experience that are causing visitor abandonment. Fixes can be measured and tested against each other, and the benefits of improvements can result in fewer emissions.
- Economic: Knowing your audience has financial benefits, as they are more likely to purchase your product or service if it meets their requirements. Quantitative data analysis can identify potential cost savings by reducing data payload sizes where optimizations can be made.
- Conversion: If a product matches an audience's requirements, they will be likely to use it regularly and this will increase its popularity and gain trust, word of mouth, and social standing.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
A User-research plan with a template. Plus some additional interview templates. Also a user-experience return-on-investment calculator.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, UI, Patterns, Ideation, Research, Usability, Compatibility, Reporting, KPIs
If you provide physical goods or services, you may also have to account for the sustainability impact of delivery services. This can often be tricky, but courier companies may provide useful tooling to help you identify emissions data for routing.
A plan of action has been established for non-users and other stakeholders who might be passively impacted by a digital product or service, such as neighbors accepting parcels, traffic jams due to deliveries, etc. Research their needs and understand how they might be affected.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.3
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: To the extent that they can be planned for up-front through verifiable research practices, interventions such as planning with suppliers can potentially significantly reduce the environmental impact of a digital product or service.
- Social Equity: By including other potentially marginalized groups as part of the research process, product teams can potentially head off unintended consequences or requirements these groups may have before they occur.
- Accessibility: By including people who might not be primary or secondary users, such as people with disabilities who may be specifically impacted by the need for such services; as key stakeholders in research, this community's specific needs can be better addressed.
- Economic: Up-front research on a product or service's entire ecosystem, including the wider aspects like indirect services will help organizations more effectively manage project budgets.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Physical goods carbon footprint and emissions calculator.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Research, Usability, Hardware, E-Waste, Reporting, KPIs, Marketing
While some things require the use of electricity, during the early ideation phase you could consider wireframing or rapid prototyping (using paper) among other offline tools to reduce energy consumption. Even the electronic versions of these may have a lower carbon cost than committing to building a full-blown experience for each idea.
Wireframes, and rapid prototyping are utilized to quickly build consensus, reduce risk, and lower the number of resources needed to build features.
Users are involved within the iteration and design process using participatory design, and when conducting user-testing reach out to your community to help improve your product by allowing them to apply their knowledge and experience to your product or service.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.4
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Incorporating wireframes, prototypes, and user-testing into early product design cycles improves environmental impact by helping product teams build only the features visitors want. This reduces resource use and lowers emissions.
- Economic: Early rough ideation can improve financial performance, since organizations won't waste time and money building features people don't use.
- Conversion: Tested user-interfaces often improve conversion rates as they have been optimized to remove confusing aspects of the layout that cause problematic friction and arrange content to optimize the fastest user flow (which can help emissions).
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
A website wireframe example from SlickPlan.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Ideation, Research, Software, Strategy
Brainstorming allows you to flush out ideas before you commit to pursuing a path. Being considerate of not just your visitors but other individuals who may be affected by your product or service (including non-humans, like the environment!) is a useful practical exercise as it may influence your decisions in how you scope your project.
All stakeholders have been considered using a human-centered approach during the brainstorming process.
The planetary needs and ecological boundaries of a project have been taken into account during the brainstorming process.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.5
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: By helping key project stakeholders better understand the ecological impact of a potential digital product or service, its environmental impact can be identified and reduced throughout its lifecycle.
- Social Equity: For other potentially marginalized groups, such as those who speak different languages, live in low-bandwidth areas, use older devices, have other barriers to accessing information, and so on, accounting for their needs early in the process will reduce the need for costly redesigns to accompany their requirements later on due to demand (or producing specialist alternative sites to cope with their functionality).
- Accessibility: By understanding the accessibility communities' requirements in the early stages of a digital project, inclusive design can be prioritized throughout the product or service life-cycle, which will lead to efficiency savings in developer time (due to not having to retrofit accessibility) and fewer emissions from the patching process.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
A product brainstorming guide / framework.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Ideation, Research, Strategy, KPIs
When providing the option to download, save, print, or access anything online, defaulting to the most lightweight, least featureful version will reduce emissions through passive browsing; with non-essential information removed from the screen either to be shown when it's required or eliminated.
The path taken to access the service (the initial contact with the website or service) should be as efficient and as simple as possible (time required to complete an action displayed, reducing too much choice, ensuring visitors know what's required at the start of a complex set of steps, etc).
The users journey (when browsing an accessed website or service) should be as smooth as possible. User-research is key, as is building on established design patterns that people already understand.
Visitors can complete tasks without distractions or non-essential features getting in the way.
Visitors see only information that is relevant to their experience, without non-essential information being displayed on the screen.
Ensure that actionable information such as pop-up or modal windows can only be initiated by the visitor.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.6
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Streamlining a user-experience to remove barriers and non-essential items (which eliminates waste from code and content) reduces the amount of time visitors spend on their devices trying to complete tasks or find information. This reduces the amount of energy used and lowers emissions.
- Privacy: Collecting less information by hiding non-essential features will be beneficial for data protection as you can reduce how much information is presented to the visitor and, in turn, how much is exposed to a minimum (if any is needed during the experience).
- Social Equity: Lightweight experiences work better for people with older devices, those who live in low-bandwidth environments, and so on. The benefits for lower-powered devices are that fewer emissions will be generated, as the device's reduced capabilities will often have lower energy requirements.
- Accessibility: Intuitive, lightweight user-experiences that are easy to understand improve accessibility, especially for people with cognitive disabilities, and will benefit sustainability in terms of less confusion which could impact the time spent on websites trying to find content.
- Performance: Displaying less information on the screen by reducing the amount of content until it is necessary will naturally reduce bandwidth consumption over the lifecycle of a product or service, and may make an experience feel faster.
- Economic: Lower data payloads resulting from reducing visitor choices and simplifying an interface by reducing the amount of information can help reduce the burden of choice and convince visitors during the decision-to-purchase process.
- Conversion: Busy websites with too much information laid out haphazardly will lead to confusion and abandonment. Following conventions and patterns with a clean, distraction-free layout will reduce churn, page abandonment, and barriers to entry.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
The example shown for this airline check-in page shows how performance by default can benefit visitors.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Content, UI, Patterns, Usability, Performance
It's great to have a pretty-looking website or application but to ensure a sustainable design, it's important to avoid cluttering up the interface with too many visuals (which aren't necessary to the content). Keeping a clean design will reduce website rendering, and thereby emissions.
Decorative design is used only when it improves the user-experience, and unnecessary assets or ones that fail to benefit the visitor or sustainability are removed (or rendered optional and disabled by default).
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.7
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Using fewer typefaces will reduce the page size and use fewer resources to render the new font on the visitor's machine for that page's instance (saving DOM rendering cycles).
- Social Equity: Bloat costs bandwidth, slimming down the web matters to remain inclusive.
- Accessibility: Decorative design can be intrusive (if marked up incorrectly) or distracting.
- Performance: HTTP requests can be reduced both with fewer fonts and by creating CSS / SVG sprites if the images are unlikely to change.
- Conversion: A page with fewer heavy elements is more likely to load within 3 seconds.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
This is an example of an external web asset (a custom typeface). Too many of these can be detrimental to the performance of a website or application due to their need to be rendered (through CPU cycles) to the screen on every element in which they are used, which is bad news for sustainability!
@font-face {
font-family: "Trickster";
src: local("Trickster"),
url("trickster-COLRv1.otf") format("opentype") tech(color-COLRv1), url("trickster-outline.otf")
format("opentype"), url("trickster-outline.woff") format("woff");
}
Source: @font-face.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Usability, Assets, Performance
Information architecture is a central part of the Web development process, and how you structure a website ensures that people can way-find your content easily. Having appropriately marked-up links within your product or service allows visitors, search engines, and social networks to identify key information quickly.
Provide an accessible, easy-to-use navigation menu with search features that help visitors easily find what they need.
Implement an efficient (human-readable) sitemap that is organized and is regularly updated. This helps search engines better index website content, which helps visitors more quickly find what they are looking for.
Implement a way for visitors to find out about new content and services.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.8
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Efficient navigation with intuitive search features means visitors spend less time and energy finding what they require and accomplishing tasks. This also lowers emissions.
- Accessibility: Accessible navigation improves the user-experience for people with disabilities. Being able to find the correct pages quickly also helps to reduce data wastage.
- Performance: Efficient website structure has an impact on performance in that people can more quickly find what they require. This doesn't necessarily mean pages or assets load faster, but if appropriate way-finding mechanisms are in place, less time on-screen can result, which is beneficial for emissions.
- Economic: If visitors more quickly find what they need, this could potentially reduce hosting costs if those are based on data transfer.
- Conversion: Good website structure and navigation can also improve conversion rates if more people find what they require. This could also be true if visitors are alerted to new content they have expressed interest in.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Information Architecture of a Website Sitemap.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Accessibility, UI, Usability, HTML, Marketing
Time is precious, wasting a visitor's will cause frustration and lead to abandonment or resentment. Additionally, the more time a visitor spends in front of a screen, the more energy they utilize. As such, throwing stuff in front of the visitor vying for their attention might sound like good business (even though we know due to banner blindness it rarely works), but it mostly damages the environment and dissuades the visitor.
The visitor can easily control how (and when) they receive information to both improve attention and respect with the visitor.
Features that don't distract people or unnecessarily lengthen the time they spend using the product or service have a higher priority than others.
Avoid using infinite scroll or related attention-keeping tactics.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.9
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Using pagination rather than infinite scrolling allows individuals to request data on demand rather than encouraging overconsumption, thereby reducing their carbon impact by way of using psychology to encourage healthy (and sustainable) browsing habits.
- Transparency: Being open and honest with visitors about their experience and avoiding moving their attention in negative ways will lead to greater trust and the potential for repeat custom.
- Social Equity: By avoiding dark and deceptive patterns and ensuring that the visitor's attention is focused on achieving their aims, you reduce the potential for confusion, mistakes, and lapses in judgment which could lead to consequences for them and the trust they have in your business down the road.
- Accessibility: Being aware of accessibility barriers and accounting for them within your processes will allow you to reduce barriers to access and prioritize the availability of information for visitors who may access information using different tooling (such as assistive technology like a screen reader). In doing so you can reduce the additional emissions produced by accessibility tools as visitors can find what they want quicker, and fewer mistakes are likely to be made during a session.
- Performance: Certain attention-seeking features like notification requests or cookie banners can detract from visitor performance, as time is spent by consumers navigating through methods to close or hide the annoyances. Finding better ways of presenting the information will make an experience feel faster and reduce the barriers to access which trigger a block in the user-flow.
- Economic: Organizations that monetize visitor attention strive to keep it as long as possible, therefore increasing their product or service's environmental impact. Conversely, organizations that strive to streamline interactions while still meeting visitor's needs (and their own business goals) measurably reduce their product or service's environmental impact, and potentially reach new audiences.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Community guidelines can help foster a safe, conflict-free environment. Here is also an example of an attention manipulation tactic to be avoided.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Patterns, Usability, Assets
Visitors can identify patterns fairly easily, and they like browsing websites and apps and feeling as if they know what they are dealing with. As such, focusing your efforts on producing a product or service that is clean and has key components in easy-to-recognize locations (and visuals) will allow faster user-experiences and fewer emissions.
Provide only essential components visible at the time they are needed. Where appropriate, interfaces should deploy visual styles (patterns) that are easily recognized and used.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.10
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Using easily recognized design components will reduce the amount of time visitors spend browsing between pages, trying to identify the information they came to your resource to locate. As such, the less time visitors spend on your site, the greater the efficiency savings in terms of emissions.
- Accessibility: Recognizable design patterns can help people with cognitive disabilities easily understand how to perform a task. Similarly, simple layouts often improve access to information as well.
- Performance: Using recognized patterns that appear where visitors expect, and only when they require them may increase the perceived speed of the website or application as navigation from point to point will increase due to the ease of use.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Clean, simple, honest website layout examples.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Patterns, Usability, Assets, CSS
Manipulating the visitor into doing things you want them to is a short-term gain, long-term loss tactic tool. It's ethically bad, unsustainable, and should be avoided at all costs.
Avoid what are commonly known as dark patterns, deceptive design, or unethical coding techniques, which manipulate visitors into taking actions not necessarily in their best interest (anti-right click, no-copy, requiring an account to purchase, etc).
Advertisements and sponsorships are both ethical and clearly identified with the product or service, only presenting them when they provide real economic and ethical value and don't diminish a visitor's experience.
Remove unused and unconsented page tracking.
Optimization for search engines, social networks, and third-party services are organically led with good coding practices with user-experience the focus, not manipulating the services to gain greater priority through obfuscating content, pages, websites, or applications with redundancy or non-useful and optimized (to the visitor) material.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.11
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Many deceptive design patterns have visitors wasting time and energy trying to undo choices they never intended to make. Avoiding them therefore reduces energy use.
- Privacy: Many deceptive patterns are intentionally designed to undermine data privacy. Ensuring you comply with ethical privacy practices and avoiding such patterns will avoid potential legal conflicts. You also reduce additional data being sent among the providers of tracking and advertising data.
- Accessibility: Dark and deceptive design patterns often intentionally block or hide access to information, which especially undermines the experience of people with disabilities who use assistive technologies. By avoiding them, you will give those with accessibility needs justification to trust your brand. Furthermore, avoiding unsustainable or carbon-intensive implementations will prevent making any existing situations worse.
- Performance: Interference with the user-interface (such as removing the ability to copy text) causes unnecessary friction and forces the visitor to spend more time on the page to work around the barrier put in place. This uses additional energy as they try to find a solution onsite, elsewhere, or give up entirely. Using ethical, non-disruptive coding practices will speed up interactions within your website.
- Economic: Ethical websites incentivize customers to whitelist your website on ad blockers.
- Conversion: Avoiding dark and deceptive patterns will likely result in fewer complaints. A classic example of this is the use of CAPTCHAs which can disrupt the visitor, cause accessibility barriers, and reduce the legitimate use of your product or service.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Examples of dark patterns to be avoided.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, UI, Patterns, Usability, Compatibility, Assets, JavaScript, Security, JavaScript, Privacy
Everything produced by designers, developers, writers, and those involved with a project should be in an open format, well maintained, and curated in a common format (so everyone is working from the same model).
The deliverables output, including documentation, are used upstream of the project and produced in ways that will allow it to be reused in subsequent projects.
Design functionality and technical specifications are documented so that deliverables are comprehensible by the project team and transferable to the development team.
Developers have access to code comments and other View Source affordances which can reduce the burden to access, understand, maintain, and utilize production-ready code as this will reduce redundancy and foster an open source culture.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.12
- Medium
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: Deliverables that are used in common, easy-to-understand formats will take less computer time to learn and adapt to the environment. As such, less energy will be spent trying to manage a project with emissions savings as a consequence.
- Economic: Well-documented projects that can be implemented with ease are likely to have fewer ongoing costs due to a lower need for maintenance.
- Conversion: Using an open format, to which anyone can contribute, will have a lower barrier to entry as there will likely be no cost involved in participation. Therefore it will encourage more individuals to play an active role in your project's future.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
System Design of a Website functional structure.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Patterns, Education, Assets, Software
Design systems allow common components and patterns to be formalized and managed within a website or application. By using such a tool, designers and developers can avoid reinventing existing tooling and thereby reduce wasted time (and emissions).
A design system is employed based on web standards and recognizable patterns to mutualize interface components and provide a consistent experience for visitors.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.13
- Low
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Consistent interfaces that employ web standards require less energy and resources across the product ecosystem, as they are usually tightly optimized. Also, design systems that incorporate environmental criteria can help to scale digital sustainability across the enterprise and reduce redundancy within code, resulting in collectively reduced energy use and impact.
- Social Equity: A design system with standardized, lightweight components will improve access to information for people in low-bandwidth areas, on older devices, and so on. Also, design systems will reduce the chance of biases that could affect such groups being introduced.
- Accessibility: A design system with accessible components will improve access to information for people with disabilities. Building design features with accessibility baked in by default reduces the potential that people with accessibility requirements will be left out during the website or application's lifecycle.
- Performance: Design Systems are built using standardized components that reduce the churn of repeat coding, thereby reducing developer coding turnarounds and, as a byproduct, improve performance and reduce emissions during the process. This will inherently reduce emissions considerably through the building of sustainable patterns.
- Economic: Because of their use of standardized components and their avoidance of redundancy, design systems reduce costs as the development time may be reduced (even accounting for the maintenance time involved in having one). Also, familiar-looking websites that can be browsed with ease are likely to suffer lower bounce rates (where visitors just give up) due to the ease of transition (unlike a unique-looking website which can make navigation increasingly complex).
- Conversion: Design Systems encourage using recognizable components throughout a design, which will help visitors identify and utilize the product or service successfully. As such, this will reduce complaints and annoyance, which can help increase customer retention. Also, user-interface consistency improves visitor trust as individuals will recognize familiar components within your design and know how to utilize them, and this can improve conversion rates as it will lower the rates of abandonment.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Polaris Design System.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Patterns, Education, Usability, Assets, Strategy
Of all the data that comprises the largest over-the-wire transfer rates within the average website or application, images are usually those that are responsible due to their quantity and usefulness. As such, doing all you can to reduce their size and unnecessary loading will be beneficial for sustainability.
The need for images has been determined considering the quantity, format, and size necessary for implementation.
Resize, optimize, and compress each image (outside the browser), offering different sizes (for each image) for different screen resolutions.
Provide Lazy Loading to ensure image assets only load when they are required.
Let the visitor select the display size, and provide the option to deactivate images.
Set up a media management and use policy to reduce the overall impact of images, with criteria for media compression and file formats.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.15
- High
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Image assets often make up the largest part of a web page's overall size. Compressing and delivering them in lightweight formats that improve the user-experience can often reduce the hardware burden on older devices. This in turn can reduce overall consumer e-waste by reducing forced upgrade cycles.
- Social Equity: Lightweight images work better for visitors in low-bandwidth areas and on older devices, as long as the device can support the formats used.
- Accessibility: Delivering images in ways that are meaningful to visitors improves access to information.
- Performance: By optimizing your images, you can significantly speed up your website in terms of HTTP requests, data transfer, and even in some cases the physical rendering effort - all of which have an impact on a visitor's user-experience and speed of access.
- Economic: Visitors with data caps will benefit from optimized resources as they will be able to consume more content, and hosts of content will endure smaller bills due to lower overheads.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
<img src="image.jpg" alt="..." loading="lazy"/>
<iframe src="video-player.html" title="..." loading="lazy"></iframe>
Source: Lazy loading.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, UI, Usability, Assets, HTML, Performance, Software
Animation can be both CPU and GPU-intensive and have implications for accessibility. While visually appealing and useful in certain situations, care and attention should be taken when considering the use of a high emissions technology.
Use animation only when it adds value to a visitor's experience, and not for decorative elements.
Progressively display an appropriate quantity of animation so as not to overburden the visitor or diminish expected device behavior.
Allow visitors to start, stop, pause, or otherwise control animated content.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.17
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Animation can be resource intensive. It can utilize both the CPU and GPU, consume a vast amount of RAM, and take a while to render. This is without considering the accessibility and usability issues it contains. By taking all of this into account, allowing the disabling or reduction of animation can be environmentally beneficial.
- Social Equity: Individuals from different nations and backgrounds may have differing views on the use of animation, and different devices may support different levels of technology. As such, catering to many viewpoints will ensure the widest possible audience.
- Accessibility: Animation that flashes can potentially trigger seizure conditions such as epilepsy; therefore it is critically important that you avoid any hazards within your designs.
- Performance: Compressing, removing, or otherwise reducing animation files improves performance as less syntax will exist within your product or service codebase.
- Economic: Subtle animation can draw the visitor's eye to useful information that could assist you to financial success, but this must be done ethically, and without overdoing it.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
body *,
body *::before,
body *::after {
animation-delay: -1ms !important;
animation-duration: 1ms !important;
animation-iteration-count: 1 !important;
background-attachment: initial !important;
transition-duration: 1ms !important;
transition-delay: -1ms !important;
scroll-behavior: auto !important;
}
}
Source: Prefers-reduced-motion: Sometimes less movement is more.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Accessibility, UI, Usability, CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Since the advent of the modern web, the ability to include embedded fonts and provide a more customized experience has seen their use explode. They aren't always the most performant option (which poses emissions hazards) and come with a few issues such as Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC) / Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT) which should be addressed.
Use standard system-level (web-safe / pre-installed) fonts as much as possible.
The number of fonts, and the variants within typefaces (such as weight and characters) are limited within a project, using the most performant file format available.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.18
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Reducing the number of fonts being loaded will reduce the amount of rendering that occurs, all of which have a carbon impact (as the physical rendering of non-system typefaces graphically onto every element of the DOM will have an energy commitment).
- Social Equity: System-level (Web Safe) fonts work across the widest range of devices and platforms, which improves access to information for those who may have tightly regulated browsing habits or limited availability.
- Performance: By providing Web fonts that are optimized but optional, visitors can experience the product or service with a level of speed versus aesthetic they feel comfortable with.
- Economic: While pretty, custom typefaces are entirely optional on the Web and, as such, the bandwidth they consume (and the emissions this produces) are unnecessary. This added cost can be eliminated, but the benefit such fonts give in readability or personality for a website or application is worth considering.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
font-family: Iowan Old Style, Apple Garamond, Baskerville, Times New Roman, Droid Serif, Times, Source Serif Pro, serif, Apple Color Emoji, Segoe UI Emoji, Segoe UI Symbol;
Source: System Font Stack.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Usability, CSS, Performance
Media, images, fonts, and documents enrich the Internet. The problem is that people may not want to watch a video, listen to an audio file, look at an image, or use a specific application. By providing alternative formats to anything you embed, you ensure the widest possible audience can benefit from it (and reduced carbon output will occur as the alternative text will induce less consumer hardware thrashing than its rich media alternative).
All proprietary file formats (such as PDF) are offered in HTML for accessibility and to ensure future availability.
All custom typefaces (using font-display) are subsetted and offered as part of a font stack with a system font as a backup.
All images provide meaningful alternative text for screen reader users (or when images fail to load) accessibility.
Audio provides text transcripts of conversations as an alternative to playing the media.
Video provides text transcripts (at minimum), subtitles (using WebVTT), and for accessibility best practice, offer closed captions and sign language options.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.19
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Offering low-impact alternatives to media formats reduces the amount of battery-draining hardware processing required for visitors to find the information they require.
- Social Equity: Not every visitor will be in a situation where they can watch a video or listen to audio; therefore it makes sense to have a plaintext alternative.
- Accessibility: Certain accessibility barriers can prevent media from being consumed, as such it's important to offer different ways of viewing a site's content.
- Performance: Reducing the interactivity of a website doesn't mean a lesser experience, it can help visitors access what they need quicker.
- Economic: Media is costly to produce and host, text is cheap and takes little data to download, it can help reduce your hosting costs to serve a media-free setting within pages.
- Conversion: Text alternatives (like transcripts) to media can be indexed by search engines, this can allow your project to be found easier.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, avenir next, avenir, segoe ui, helvetica neue, helvetica, Cantarell, Ubuntu, roboto, noto, arial, sans-serif;
Source: System Font Stack.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Content, UI, Usability, Compatibility, Assets, HTML, Performance
Certain visitors such as those with visual disabilities or speech agents (like Amazon Alexa) may rely on an experience without the graphical part of an interface. As such, they potentially may use less data or may have a different carbon impact on the Web.
Support speech browsing and other non-graphical ways to interact with content that provide alternatives to a visual interface.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.21
- Low
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Aural (speech) browsers have no visual component, which reduces the environmental impact they suffer when browsing pages (as a screen is often one of the biggest drainers of a consumer's battery). Being able to look up information through such mechanisms through your product or service thereby will help reduce your overall emissions greatly.
- Accessibility: People who have accessibility needs and browse the Web using specialist equipment, hardware, or software will benefit from the assistance aids you have built into your product or service.
- Conversion: Increasing compatibility by supporting a wider range of device types, outside the most popular or well-known sort of hardware and software, will encourage new audiences to visit and potentially become customers.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
code {
background-color: #292a2b;
color: #e6e6e6;
font-family: monospace;
speak: literal-punctuation; /* Reads all punctuation out loud in iOS VoiceOver */
}
Source: Let's Talk About Speech CSS.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Content, UI, Usability, Compatibility, HTML, Performance, Software
Notifications whether through the browser or messaging can be potentially useful, but only used in moderation. Spam and the lack of control are contributing sources of Internet emissions and as such, businesses should aim to reduce such actions.
Remove non-essential notifications while justifying and reducing the practice of e-mailing or text messaging to what is strictly necessary. Useful notifications (such as alerts for new content) should be used with care and restraint.
Let the visitor control notifications (for example through the browser, SMS, or by email) and adjust messaging preferences, and the option to unsubscribe, logout, and close an account should be available and visible.
Clearly explain the result of a potential input through helpful prompts and messages that explain errors, next steps, and so on. This will help manage their expectations.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.22
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Notifications that can inform visitors about important events can help them avoid having to constantly refresh pages, as such they act as a shortcut to only loading information when the information becomes available, leading to emission savings.
- Privacy: If used appropriately, notifications can provide personalized content to specific devices, which reduces the risk of information exposure.
- Accessibility: Being able to signpost individuals to information through helpful notifications or error messages will have a beneficial effect of avoiding visitor abandonment. It's especially essential to ensure that all information is presented so that such critical information doesn't discriminate based on an individual's abilities, as you could exclude a massive part of your audience.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
<form>
<label for="choose">Would you prefer a banana or cherry? (required)</label>
<input id="choose" name="i-like" required />
<button>Submit</button>
</form>
Source: Client-side form validation.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Usability, JavaScript, Privacy
Printing or downloading documents can both be a net benefit and a net cost in terms of sustainability as it can reduce repeat requests to websites, but the act of printing (especially when unoptimized) wastes valuable ink and paper.
If the production of paper documents is essential, it should be designed to limit its impact to the lowest possible. Create a CSS Print stylesheet and test it with different types of content. Ensure PDF printing is encouraged over paper-based storage.
Provide all downloadable documents in a state of being optimized, compressed, and in a variety of accessible file formats.
If a document is likely to be re-used, generate the document once on the server-side (preferably on a cookie-free domain) rather than forcing the effort to be duplicated.
Clearly display the document name, a summary, the file size, and the format, allowing the visitor a choice if possible of both the format, and the language (if not the same as the web page). Furthermore, be sure to avoid embedding the document within Web pages (provide a direct link to download or view within the browser instead).
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.23
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Reducing the need to print documents or providing a printing StyleSheet will remove the emissions from wasted paper and ink.
- Accessibility: Providing a range of inclusively designed downloadable documents in a variety of formats which the visitor can choose between can benefit those with accessibility needs as they can choose the best fitting download for their device.
- Performance: Compressing or otherwise optimizing documents will allow them to be downloaded faster by the consumer, which helps visitors avoid having to wait to view uniquely formatted offline files.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Embeddable Print CSS Stylesheet Library.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, UI, Usability, Compatibility, Assets, Performance, Hardware, Software, E-Waste
The organization has policies and practices in place to incorporate stakeholder-focused testing and prototyping into its product development cycles.
The organization has outlined processes it uses to prototype and test new features, product ideas, and user-interface components when applicable with real users who represent various stakeholder perspectives, including people with slow connection, with disabilities, with difficulties using digital services, and so on.
The organization has appropriately resourced these processes to support its long-term product viability.
The organization has training materials to onboard new product team members to these practices.
The organization regularly conducts extensive testing and user interviews to validate whether the released features are meeting both business goals and visitor needs.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.24
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Potentially less energy use and reduced emissions as visitors complete tasks more quickly and efficiently.
- Economic: Organizational policies that prioritize user-research help to reduce and mitigate risks associated with building the wrong thing (incurring technical debt), which can increase costs. Additionally, iterative testing and prototyping will reduce the resources needed to build new features.
- Conversion: Reduced visitor frustration resulting from a well-researched and built interface will likely result in less visitor churn.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
A comprehensive usability testing toolkit.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, UI, Ideation, Research, Education, Usability, Governance
Products and services at any stage of a project can suffer bugs or issues that need to be resolved. Fixing these regressions also generates additional development and environmental costs. By resolving such issues, you can reduce the chances of a visitor giving up on a session and thereby reduce the amount of wasted energy your website emits overall.
The codebase has been checked for bugs, performance issues hav been identified, and accessibility or security problems have been accounted for at either monthly or quarterly timeframes (depending on your scheduling allowance).
Non-regression tests are implemented for all important functionality.
Regression testing has been incorporated into each release cycle to ensure that new features don't introduce bugs or otherwise conflict with existing software functionality.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.25
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Regular service audits reduce technical debt, which improves performance and environmental sustainability. Regression analysis also supports continuous improvement and lowers resource use over time, which also reduces emissions.
- Security: Regular auditing of a product or service will not only identify potential sources of breaches, but it will also identify areas of improvement both in security and privacy.
- Accessibility: Maintaining inclusivity over time through regular audits and testing reduces outages, improves access to information, and creates a better experience for all users, not just those with accessibility needs.
- Economic: Ongoing regression testing improves security, which reduces risk and its associated costs.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
It is important to automate measurements of page speed, time-to-first-byte, and page score to verify recent changes didn't increase these metrics. Automatic threshold alerts or anomalies on metrics help indicate regression. Identify target "page weight budgets" to help establish a baseline. Popular performance tools like Google Lighthouse can help too. Similarly, environmental metrics can be measured or assessed and evaluated against thresholds defined in a sustainability budget. Here is a checklist for auditing a web design.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, UI, Research, Usability, Compatibility, Performance, Security, Privacy, Reporting, KPIs
Occasionally, you may find that features you have developed for a product or service have little to no active users or could be better implemented to bring better value. Undertaking research to identify redundancy allows you to optimize your codebase (and reduce emissions).
Visitor feedback, adoption, and churn rates are monitored of product or service features and their insights incorporated into future releases.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.27
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Feedback can help product teams make choices that improve a product or service's environmental impact, a clear example of this would be ensuring that frequently used features are more visible than lesser used features, thereby reducing the burden of findability. Which helps visitors spend less time attempting to achieve their goals.
- Performance: User-testing allows you to focus on your product goals, ensuring that you maintain a minimum viable product and not one overburdened with complexity. In doing so, your product or service will be lightweight and run quickly.
- Economic: If you can avoid wasting development time building features that bring little value to the consumer, your precious resources can be better spent where it will provide a better return.
- Conversion: Feedback often improves conversion rates because it ensures that your product or service reflects the needs of your audience.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Qualitative usability testing will help authors gain critical feedback about in-use features.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Research, Usability, Strategy, KPIs
Researching a product or service and how it is used over time allows you to iterate and ensure the features and functionality being offered match how user-needs change over time. Doing so will help you reduce code redundancy further and reduce emissions through optimization.
Usability testing has been incorporated into product cycles and the impact of these tests is routinely measured for future releases.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.28
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: When visitors can quickly and easily accomplish tasks or access information, this reduces the energy they burn searching for answers.
- Accessibility: Visitor feedback from people with disabilities can inform key improvements within the product or service, which will ensure your website or application can be used by the widest possible audience.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Here is a great usability testing starter kit that includes templates.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, UI, Research, Usability, Strategy, KPIs
Compatibility is a critical part of the sustainability mindset and should be prioritized through all products and services. If individuals wish to use older devices (or cannot upgrade due to cost) or do not wish to upgrade as frequently, it will reduce the amount of e-waste that enters the system. If something doesn't work, it's also likely to result in visitors suffering a wasted effort, potentially leading to refused access to your service (and thereby emitting further emissions).
A compatibility policy with obsolete devices and software versions, listing the supported devices brands, operating systems, and browsers (including versions) has been established.
Planned obsolescence in software updates is routinely avoided, striving to maintain compatibility for as long as possible and clearly communicating whether an update is evolutionary (large updates that can significantly reduce performance) or corrective (smaller updates that fix bugs or improve security).
The product or service regularly tests with weak connections, old browsers, and devices older than five years to ensure compatibility.
Mobile-first methods and interfaces are prototyped to ensure progressive enhancement, content prioritization, and improved accessibility.
A PWA has been either chosen or rejected based on whether it be more sustainable and compatible over a native mobile application.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]2.29
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Incompatible websites and applications across the Web encourage people to purchase new devices, which has a giant impact on the environment due to the amount of e-waste it produces. Additionally, planned obsolescence is one of the biggest contributors to e-waste on the planet. Extending the lifespan and improving digital device compatibility within your site's service plan, can improve sustainability and slow the upgrade cycle which results from sluggish digital experiences.
- Social Equity: More compatible products and services that last longer helps to reduce the digital divide, which can be a key issue in cases where income inequality, infrastructure robustness, and other factors play their part (and open your work to new markets). Similarly, because progressive web applications use established web standards, they are available to more people than more cost-prohibitive closed systems (Apple App Store, Google Play, etc).
- Accessibility: The fourth pillar of Accessibility is robustness. By incorporating accessibility into early prototypes, it becomes a priority for project teams throughout a product's lifecycle. Broken source code can also (in specific cases) impact assistive technologies (such as screen readers) and how they can read content to individuals with visual disabilities. Ensuring semantic code can provide an equal, error-free experience to all.
- Performance: Incompatible code has an energy cost, when it's non-standard, deprecated or doesn't work on a device it can take additional time to render as it is usually un-optimized for the environment, which will put pressure on the CPU and waste the consumer's battery. Using modern Web standards will help your website run fast in modern browsers.
- Economic: Product teams benefit from time savings and improved quality, organizations see cost reductions as less refactoring is required due to increased stability, and users benefit from greater trust and potentially lower product costs and maintenance fees as upgrades may not be required as frequently.
- Conversion: More compatible products and services that last longer can potentially increase conversion rates due to the lower rates of abandonment and a wider market audience that can use a barrier-free version of the product or service.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
Progressive Web Application Builder.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, UI, Research, Usability, Compatibility, Software, Security, Strategy, KPIs
Web developers are typically the implementors of ideas and concepts. With the ability to dictate code practices at the front-end and back-end, the ability to impact the visitor and sustainability of a product or service is unquestionable.
With the ability to implement code-based solutions, developers can:
- Optimize code for accessibility, performance, security, and other PPP targets.
- Reduce the burden of solutions on hardware (and their requirements).
- Provide technical features that increase digital sustainability.
By adhering to the below guidelines, individuals can make a significant difference in the reduction of front-end and back-end sustainability impacts.
Plain language summary of Web Development
- Optimize your project by using techniques to eliminate unnecessary or duplicate code.
- Ensure your project is accessible, meets sustainability targets, and contains helpful data.
- Assess third-party services, dependencies, and first-party code for issues (and value).
- Resolve incorrect code, blocking events, form errors, security issues, and outdated code.
- Provide a mobile-first layout that adapts to user preferences.
- Include useful files that may be expected by browsers or search engines.
- Use the latest version of tooling and aim to use existing features where possible.
Performance is a key part of the sustainability mindset as reductions in loading times can have a considerable impact on energy loads within CPU, GPU, RAM, and hard drive caching (among other variables), as such ensuring a performant product is essential.
Explcit goals that impact the environment and performance of the service, for example, HTTP requests, or the amount of DOM elements that need to be rendered are both set and met.
Because the payload being delivered may not always be equal in terms of energy intensity, operators of websites and applications must ensure that consideration is given for the energy intensity (or unit being evaluated) of each component. For example, non-rendering text is less computational than CSS, which in turn is less process-heavy than JavaScript, which is less resource-heavy than WebGL.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.1
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Limiting the number of server requests and the size of the DOM decreases a product or service's environmental impact by reducing CPU and GPU cycles, and RAM usage which benefits energy consumption, reducing the need to recharge devices as frequently.
- Performance: Reducing the hardware utilization as denoted above will also improve performance metrics, as a device will suffer less consumption and thrashing of limited resources.
- Conversion: Search engines consider web performance in their ranking data, as such a faster website may lead to a higher rank and potentially better conversion rates.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
A large list of ways to speed up your website within the front-end performance checklist.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Research, Performance, Networking, Strategy, KPIs
Whitespace holds no value when it's being presented to the visitor (unless they view the source code), by using minification, valuable data savings can be made which will reduce loading times.
All source code is minified upon compilation (including inline code).
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.2
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Performance: Reduced loading times as a result of less data being transferred. Though this does not inherently have an ecological benefit as whitespace is ignored by rendering engines, it does help meet sustainability targets with visitor-based improvements in terms of loading times.
- Conversion: When a page loads quickly, visitors are less likely to abandon their journey or search for their information elsewhere.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
!function(e,t){"use strict";"object"==typeof module&&"object"==typeof module.exports?module.exports=e.document?t(e,!0):function(e){if(!e.document)throw new Error("jQuery requires a window with a document");return t(e)}:t(e)}("undefined"!=typeof window?window:this,function(g,e){"use strict";var t=[],r=Object.getPrototypeOf,s=t.slice,v=t.flat?function(e){return t.flat.call(e)}:function(e){return t.concat.apply([],e)},u=t.push,i=t.indexOf
Source: jQuery Slim.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Performance
When dealing with heavy components (such as JavaScript), the ability to modularize them into smaller pieces that can be loaded as and when required reduces the amount of redundancy and serves as a great way to make your scripts more sustainable.
Breakdown bandwidth-heavy components into segments that can be loaded as required.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.3
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Performance: Having smaller (modular) components allows for more optimized caching and loading only what code functions are required (which reduces the payload). Unused portions of a resource remain un-downloaded (potentially huge savings).
- Economic: Reducing the size of large files will result in lower bandwidth bills for service providers.
- Conversion: A faster website reduces the chance of abandonment (which is especially of concern for visitors of handheld devices).
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
link.addEventListener("click", (e) => {
e.preventDefault();
import("/modules/my-module.js")
.then((module) => {
/* Do something */
})
.catch((err) => {
console.error(err.message);
});
});
Source: Dynamic Imports.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Often when coding, projects can accumulate clutter and functions that are no longer used (due to newer, more effective features being developed). By utilizing tree shaking techniques, all the "dead wood" will be automatically dropped upon compilation, reducing a file's size.
Identify and eliminate unused and dead code within CSS and JavaScript.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.4
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Removal of unused code eliminates wasted bytes from the rendering tree, which means less wasted download and potential processing time (which can be a battery-draining process).
- Performance: Unused code will not impact visitors, yet it takes up space in the cache, RAM, and takes extra time to download and render. Clearing wasted space frees' visitor resources.
- Economic: Unused code has a maintenance cost as it might affect other code, additionally, it's something else for developers to have to deal with unnecessarily.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
export function read(props) { return props.book }
import { read } from 'utilities';
eventHandler = (e) => { read({ book: e.target.value })}
Source: Tree Shaking.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Not everyone can access services equally, being sustainable is also about being accessible, fair, ethical, and ensuring that your product or service doesn't discriminate. As such, ensuring your website complies with best practices and relevant laws whilst meeting the needs of your visitors is critical as well as good business.
Your website or application must conform to WCAG (at the necessary level), plus extend beyond to obey relevant laws and meet additional visitor accessibility requirements. Building inclusively means that people with permanent, temporary, or situational disabilities will be able to more quickly find what they are looking for, and not have to spend extra time searching for a way to use your product or service.
Enhance your website or application with Accessible Rich Internet Applications (ARIA) ONLY if applicable or necessary, and accessibility enhancing features when useful or beneficial.
Deploy solutions that fight against electronic inequalities in products and services.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.5
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Inclusive websites are often more sustainable due to the effort put into improving code quality, user-experience, and limiting issues such as barriers to access that trigger waste in the service or product.
- Social Equity: There is a legal obligation to be accessible, and beyond this, turning away millions of potential visitors due to a lack of care is wasteful not only in time but also in digital and physical resources (e-waste).
- Accessibility: Adapting a digital product or service to be accessible by default will improve access to information for people with disabilities. This must be managed and maintained over time, as the sustainability benefits from reduced unnecessary friction add to the benefits of increasing your audience.
- Performance: An accessible website or application will typically be written using semantic, well-written code. While you may have more code to accommodate accessibility tooling (like ARIA), well-coded sites are usually less bloated, so they may have a performance edge that will reduce overall emissions.
- Economic: Improving the user-experience through accessibility can also improve financial performance by reducing costs (through lawsuits), building capacity, increasing sales or donations (with new audiences), and making better use of available resources.
- Conversion: Better-equipped experiences across devices and platforms signal to visitors that you are making a concentrated effort to meet their specific needs. This increases trust and can improve conversion rates.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
<img src="/image.jpg" alt="Christmas cards all lined up on a shelf.">
Source: Resources on Alternative Text for Images.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Content, UI, Research, Usability, Compatibility, Software, KPIs
Redundancy is the enemy of sustainability. Having systems in place to ensure that everyone can work from established patterns, the website or application remains clean and easy to use, and iteration over redesign is firmly in the mindset that will help promote sustainable practices. It's also worth being wary of abstracting code too early (see AHA methodology) or incorrectly, as while good abstractions can be more efficient, poor ones can waste effort and introduce complexity, bloat, and bugs to your codebase which can lead to emissions.
Remove or simplify (through rewriting for performance) your code to focus on essential features and have a cleaner, less redundant product (and codebase).
Improve (iterate) an existing creation rather than constantly redeveloping and redesigning products from scratch (duplication of coding effort) if possible to reduce visitor learning burden and developer impact.
Within CSS and JavaScript, use methodologies (like BEM) and systems like DRY and WET to optimize the arrangement and output of your source code.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.6
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: While CSS methodologies increasingly add more code to your markup, they improve maintainability (reducing development time at scale), which can reduce energy usage.
- Accessibility: Developers with accessibility requirements may find the naming conventions used in CSS methodologies easier to work with than generic CSS selector identifiers.
- Performance: Avoiding repetitive code reduces waste in markup, which reduces the time sites take to download (and reduces server energy usage).
- Economic: An optimized codebase (that's reusable) can improve productivity and code quality.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
.opinions_box {
margin: 0 0 8px 0;
text-align: center;
&__view-more {
text-decoration: underline;
}
&__text-input {
border: 1px solid #ccc;
}
&--is-inactive {
color: gray;
}
}
Source: Block, Element, Modifier.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Patterns, CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Whether advertising, chatbots, maps, or other tooling; outsourcing your service to a third-party provider may be potentially useful in certain scenarios in reducing design or development time and redundancy (which can be a win for sustainability). Third-party services, however, come with issues, such as the lack of control over emissions, and they often can potentially suffer from latency and large file sizes which may not exist if you self-hosted or created the material.
Third-party services (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, etc) have been assessed as early in the ideation or creation process as possible and as few of them are used as possible to reduce the product or service's overall ecological impact, including Scope 3 emissions.
Third-party content (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, etc) should be placed behind a click-to-load delay screen (using the "import on interaction" pattern), while alternatives to automated solutions such as chatbots should be offered.
Large CSS libraries and JavaScript frameworks are only be used if a more performant alternative that achieves the same goal cannot be used instead.
Self-hosted content has been prioritized over embedded content from third-party services.
Your own clickable icons and widgets have been created, rather than relying on third-party services to host or allow embedding within your product or service.
Third-party products, services, libraries, and frameworks are often a source of sustainability issues that cannot be controlled or managed by the first-party provider of a service. While many do provide benefits to a website, the need to justify their inclusion must be made not only by those creating the product or service but also be able to be controlled by the consumer. As showcased with cookies, websites or applications can provide a similar mechanism of disabling or refusing non-first-party features (with explanations of their purpose) - unless such features can be proven as critical for functionality.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.7
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Replacing heavy tooling and third-party services with lightweight tooling reduces visitor bandwidth usage considerably, despite having to learn a new way of doing things or reducing the visibility of such information. It can significantly reduce a page's (and data you have no control over) environmental impact, especially when it comes to Scope 3 emissions.
- Privacy: Visitors not interested in embedded content may identify the lack of third-party tracking (such as embedded pixels and tags) as a privacy benefit, as there are fewer chances that visitor data is exploited.
- Performance: Self-made widgets and controls work much faster than third-party content as you don't have to perform additional server requests, rendering requests, and such. You only include what features you require, and this reduces the overall size of the bandwidth usage (and emissions produced).
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
<iframe src="https://example.com" loading="lazy" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
Source: It's time to lazy-load offscreen iframes.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Usability, JavaScript, Performance, Software, Security, Privacy
HTML semantics are important. They don't just play a key role in making the Web look the way it does, they have a function in accessibility, SEO, and even in sustainability. Ensuring that you markup your content correctly and avoid cluttering your markup wastefully will reduce emissions.
Content must be marked up semantically using the right HTML element for the right job.
Remove optional HTML tags (which aren't required for rendering), attribute quotes, or attributes that are set to their default value.
Avoid using non-standard elements or attributes.
Only use custom elements or Web Components if you cannot utilize native HTML elements or if you need tightly regulated control over the implementation of design system components.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.8
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Sites with bloated markup waste data, also sites with broken markup could trigger memory leaks (performance issues) in apps, and following standards ensures sites will work the same across devices and platforms (reducing bugs, developer fix time, and resource waste).
- Accessibility: Semantic HTML is a great stepping stone towards making your content easier to navigate by assistive technologies. Many tags within HTML5 come with pre-loaded context about what is expected within them (reducing the need for ARIA or other descriptive features). This can also help browsers, search engines, social networks, and other "blind" technologies understand your websites or applications better. This can help you reduce barriers in terms of content navigability.
- Performance: Deprecated code isn't optimized within rendering engines, and while Web components do outperform framework components, they won't beat the native HTML elements they build upon.
- Economic: Inaccessible sites can lead to lawsuits, avoiding these is beneficial to any website owner.
- Conversion: Poorly coded sites may break features for visitors, leading to website abandonment.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
<header></header>
<section>
<article>
<figure>
<img>
<figcaption></figcaption>
</figure>
</article>
</section>
<footer></footer>
Source: Semantic HTML5 Elements Explained.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Content, Usability, Compatibility, HTML
The ability to work around render-blocking issues is a great addition to the web. From deferring code, to lazy loading, to asynchronous loading, each has its use case and each can have the potential to reduce or give performance benefits to a website or application.
All external assets have been deferred or set to async (unless required) to avoid Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC).
If external resources are required on load, their priorities (delivery route) are set correctly.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.9
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Lazy loading videos and images ensures that they are only requested once the visitor needs them (not demanded even if they aren't viewed). This saves processing power which can help older devices or those with less battery capacity access your websites and applications barrier-free.
- Performance: Letting text render first makes your website feel like it's loading faster (as the remainder will appear in the background or on demand).
- Economic: Unused content will not contribute to your server's bandwidth bills.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
<img src="image.png" loading="lazy" alt="…" width="200" height="200">
Source: Browser-level image lazy loading for the web.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Assets, CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Helping visitors avoid wasting their time can reduce the number of emissions from time spent in front of a screen. As such, by using existing technologies like metadata, robots files, and accessibility-friendly aids within the page, improvements to the experience can be made.
Metadata and microdata for search engines and social media have been optimized.
Search engines are not obstructed, while ill-intentioned robots and scripts are blocked.
Accessibility and usability aids are provided to find content, such as skip links and signposts.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.10
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: People spend a lot of time searching for the information they want, and helping them get there quicker will reduce the drain on their device battery.
- Social Equity: Paradoxically as it may seem, the concept of getting people to spend more time on your website is not often beneficial. Visitors often want to accomplish a task and move on, yet we put great effort into keeping them on-site (time-wasting). This is a dark pattern that has consequences for sustainability (consumption of resources) and potentially the visitor's health and well-being.
- Accessibility: Skip links and other aids can accelerate a visitor's journey through your website, reducing the system resources their tooling requires, and assist them in finding the content they need.
- Performance: Finding information quickly is a perceived performance. It may not physically reduce the data transferred, but it will help reduce the steps required to achieve a goal; thus, the time on-screen is lessened.
- Economic: Quick visits may encourage repeat custom when the visitor has limited spare time.
- Conversion: A well-mapped website will index properly in search engines, leading to a good page rank.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
<url>
<loc>https://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
<lastmod>2022-06-04</lastmod>
</url>
</urlset>
Source: Build and submit a sitemap.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Accessibility, UI, Usability, HTML, Marketing
Sustainability benefits can be generated in numerous ways, by making sure that your website adheres to the requests made by a browser for specific conditions to be taken into account (such as CSS media and preference queries), you can unlock benefits for the visitor, and as a by-product reduce your emissions. It's worth noting that the introduction of user preferences and APIs has increased the risk of visitor fingerprinting and privacy issues.
Apply the monochrome, prefers-contrast, prefers-color-scheme, prefers-reduced-data, prefers-reduced-transparency, and prefers-reduced-motion CSS preference queries if they will benefit your website or application. Use the print & scripting CSS media queries if they will improve the sustainability of your website.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.13
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Improving the experience for monochrome devices (using a monochrome preference query) could encourage more visitors to use these energy-efficient eInk devices. For OLED displays dark mode (prefers-color-scheme) will be more energy efficient. Animation and media have a significant impact on CPU and GPU, therefore reducing its usage (prefers-reduced-motion) will reduce energy usage. Finally, having a print-friendly stylesheet will save not only paper but also ink wastage.
- Social Equity: Media queries don't tell individuals how to experience the web, they follow the preferences of the visitor or a device's capabilities.
- Accessibility: Having a high contrast (prefers-contrast) version of a site will reduce the barriers to entry and time wasted for visually impaired visitors. Less motion may also assist people with accessibility requirements.
- Performance: Allowing visitors to have a Lo-Fi (prefers-reduced-data) version of a site could significantly reduce the carbon footprint they emit (which for individuals on a data plan would be beneficial). Additionally, by detecting if scripting is disabled and offering alternative content, you could save wasted effort and improve the performance of a product or service.
- Economic: Print media queries (or stylesheets) can save visitors additional ink and paper costs.
- Conversion: User preferences make an interface friendlier, encouraging repeat visitors.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
/* wants dark mode */
}
@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
/* wants light mode */
}
Source: The complete guide to CSS media queries.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Accessibility, UI, Usability, Assets, CSS
Visitors approach our products and services on a wide variety of devices these days. Ensuring that your device works on the widest range of devices and differing screen resolutions ensures that you will have a compatible website or application. As such, visitors can actively choose to browse on devices that emit less carbon if they wish.
Allow a website or app to work on mobile devices primarily (testing with various connection speeds), expanding to accommodate larger displays thereafter (mobile-first). It is much more effective to do the hard work to ensure that it works well on a mobile device and then scale it up to larger interfaces.
Utilize progressive enhancement and responsive web design to ensure that your work accommodates a device's capabilities, different screen sizes, and will not fail if it meets an unsupported technology.
To maximize the use of renewable energy, adapt your website or service to electricity availability using carbon-aware design techniques. This should include using situational design to reduce the codebase or functionality during high-intensity periods or adapting the user-interface to perform better in situations where scaling hardware resources can be avoided to reduce emissions.
Support other indirect methods of interaction such as voice (speech), code (QR, etc), reader view (browser, application, or RSS), or connected technology (watch, appliance, transport, etc).
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.14
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Mobile-first and responsive design interfaces reduce energy use by improving performance and providing a streamlined experience for visitors. Additionally, smaller devices are often more underpowered than larger devices. Using less energy to power screens (and potentially other hardware).
- Social Equity: Low-powered devices are frequently used in developing nations, but ensuring that content works for older devices is paramount.
- Accessibility: Mobile-first websites usually incorporate large, touch-friendly buttons, simplified navigation menus, and clear readable fonts. This often makes it easier for individuals with visual or motor impairments to interact with than a traditional desktop layout and could prove to be beneficial for certain visitors to take advantage of.
- Performance: Using lazy-loading and other delayed rendering techniques can boost website speed for small visual capacity devices.
- Economic: Ensuring that your website or application works across not only desktop devices but also smartphones and other unique screen resolutions can benefit you financially as it allows individuals to make purchases while on the move (which can be more convenient), while potentially using little or no screen.
- Conversion: Products and services that work well across a wider range of platforms and devices can encourage a wider audience to use your website or application not only in one situation but in many you might not have envisaged.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
@media screen and (min-width: 600px) {
body {
color: red;
}
}
Source: Beginner's guide to media queries.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Usability, Compatibility, CSS, Performance
When new best practices or if beneficial scripting guidance exists that will improve the visitor experience, following it should be of the highest priority (only using scripts ethically should be promoted).
Improve sustainability through accessible and performant code implementations.
When using an API, make sure you only call it when necessary. On the other side, make sure no unrequired data is sent by the API.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.15
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Removing unwatched distractions (Page Visibility API), for example, would reduce wasted visual effects such as animation from being processed in the background. This could potentially help visitors conserve battery if they leave multiple tabs open in their browser.
- Privacy: Allowing for script-free visitors can protect the privacy of visitors who may live in unsafe nations.
- Performance: Using modern APIs or low-code solutions often reduces heavy codebase usage. Having fallbacks for unavailable JavaScript allows older or less capable devices to still experience your products.
- Economic: If a product works in more situations, you can sell it to more people without it failing.
- Conversion: Fallbacks for technology that might fail can lead to sales that otherwise wouldn't exist.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
const audio = document.querySelector("audio");
// Handle page visibility change:
// - If the page is hidden, pause the video
// - If the page is shown, play the video
document.addEventListener("visibilitychange", () => {
if (document.hidden) {
audio.pause();
} else {
audio.play();
}
});
Source: Page Visibility API.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Accessibility, JavaScript, Security
The dangers of scripting are well known, and vulnerabilities are discovered with increasing regularity. As such, it's of ethical benefit for authors to ensure all code used regularly passes security processes.
Check the code for vulnerabilities, exploits, header issues, and code injection.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.16
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Websites that have no outstanding security issues are less likely to become a target for individuals who might exploit them (consuming vast amounts of data in the process).
- Security: Having a secure website can prevent personal information from being exploited.
- Performance: A secure website is less likely to have its infrastructure breached, which could lead to vast amounts of data being stolen, corrupted, or destroyed.
- Economic: Preventing security issues will help your project and visitors avoid financial crime.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
This article has information and examples of XSS security issues to avoid.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, JavaScript, Security, Privacy
While JavaScript may not cause the most website bloat, it can cause very high emissions in terms of CPU load due to the rendering process, thereby it makes sense to consider the use of dependencies and third-party code carefully.
Prevent developers from downloading and installing JavaScript libraries to run locally (client-side) when they are not needed by checking for unused dependencies and uninstalling those that aren't needed and removing them from your package.json file.
Only use libraries where necessary as this will reduce the amount of JavaScript that has to be downloaded and parsed by the browser. Consider whether you can use a native JavaScript API instead. Check the package size, and whether individual modules can be installed and imported rather than the whole library.
Regularly check dependencies and keep them up-to-date.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.17
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Developer's machines do not need to waste energy installing and / or rendering packages that are not needed.
- Security: Third-party code can contain bugs and security issues. Keeping packages up-to-date and using fewer third-party libraries reduces the likelihood of security flaws.
- Performance: Reduction in client-side JavaScript normally results in faster websites.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
npm uninstall lodash
Source: Uninstalling packages and dependencies.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Patterns, JavaScript, Performance, Software, Security
Search engines and browsers regularly examine websites, requesting specific files by default (they expect them to exist). If the files don't exist, this will lead to potential errors and emissions being caused when they could be created, especially as the files offer SEO, user-experience, and other benefits to visitors.
Include the favicon.ico, robots.txt, opensearch.xml, site.webmanifest, and sitemap.xml documents.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.18
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Search engines or browsers request certain files by default, ensuring they are in place will reduce loading errors, and may provide efficiency enhancements in how visitors find or interact with a site.
- Accessibility: OpenSearch enables the browser's default search box rather than a custom solution to be integrated with your website search, which may aid accessibility as it encourages the use of a browser native component (and / or keyboard shortcuts) rather than a website or application which may suit certain accessibility requirements better.
- Performance: Files that are expected will produce HTTP requests, ensuring they are met will satisfy the products making them and potentially reduce the requests once they are discovered.
- Economic: Robots and Sitemap files can be utilized by search engines to help make your website more findable, this could lead to more visitors and potentially more customers as a result.
- Conversion: Robots can be used to target specific search engines, helping to ensure content is correctly indexed to get a good placement so that visitors can find you easily.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Source: About /robots.txt.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Patterns, Compatibility, Assets, Marketing
Several small assets can be included within a website, conferring a range of benefits upon the website or application that utilizes them. They each have a low carbon footprint, so while they do create emissions, it's worth including them for the benefits they provide.
Include standards such as ads.txt, carbon.txt, humans.txt, security.txt and robots.txt.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.19
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Plaintext requires no rendering. If visitors (or search engines) know about these useful files (like carbon.txt) they can load quicker and with less CPU / GPU impact than any HTML website.
- Transparency: The humans file provides credit to people involved in a site's creation, and security offers critical points of contact if an issue is discovered. Both are valuable additions to a project.
- Performance: Plaintext files contain no links, no markup, and have no imprint. Putting credits (for example) in such a file will reduce data transfer and have a lower rendering footprint.
- Economic: The ads.txt file is part of a scheme to reduce advertising fraud, it could be useful.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
/* TEAM */
Your title: Your name.
Site: email, link to a contact form, etc.
Twitter: your Twitter username.
Location: City, Country.
/* THANKS */
Name: name or url
/* website */
Last update: YYYY/MM/DD
Standards: HTML5, CSS3,..
Components: Modernizr, jQuery, etc.
Software: Software used for the development
Source: Humans.txt Quick start.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Patterns, Security
The Web is full of dead, often proprietary code, created using standards that have been superseded or by groups that aren't recognized. By following recognized coding standards, you ensure that your code will be rendered properly by browsers (and reduce the potential for added emissions occurring from unmaintained rendering processes).
Exclude deprecated formats and standards, the only exception being if consumer support demands maintaining older standards to provide a functional product.
Don't use an older standard if a newer recommendation will do the same job as / or more effectively.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.20
- Low
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Deprecated standards will not be optimized or supported by future browsers, which could lead to broken functionality or a slow experience, wasting time and visitor resources.
- Security: Old code can potentially be exploited if security issues arise (and browsers stop supporting the features). Ensuring you maintain standards should be a part of your processes.
- Accessibility: Deprecated web standards often have poor support in assistive technologies, avoiding them will help to provide a semantic experience that works well for everyone.
- Performance: Modern web standards are highly optimized, avoiding deprecated or less efficient standards will increase the longevity of your product and reduce the need for a carbon-intensive redesign.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE cross-domain-policy SYSTEM "http://www.adobe.com/xml/dtds/cross-domain-policy.dtd">
<cross-domain-policy>
<site-control permitted-cross-domain-policies="none"/>
</cross-domain-policy>
Source: Avoid using the now deprecated Cross Domain format unless you have an explicit requirement for it, as Flash is deprecated.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Accessibility, Compatibility, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Performance
Every product or service is different, and each will require a different set of tooling to accomplish the most sustainable result. Deciding whether to go with a bulky framework, Static Site Generator (SSG), or a Content Management System (CMS) takes careful planning based on client or service requirements.
Identify the requirements and from this, choose the implementation of the product or service. A simpler technological implementation may use more human resources but could have a smaller footprint. A prebuilt solution may use more system resources (and thereby produce more emissions upon render) but have a faster build-time (emitting less carbon during development).
As a general rule, coding from scratch is the best-performing methodology (though if an existing solution is actively maintained, it may be better optimized than what you could produce). Therefore, use native components and file systems to a WYSIWYG editor or heavy framework, and be considerate of the impact of third-party solutions.
If choosing a code generation tool, use a Static Site Generator in preference to a bulky content management system. Because SSGs often start using a minimalist content entry format (like markdown) and all of the compilation is done before the website is uploaded, the emissions benefit comes from the server not having to place as much effort into serving pages (as they are static) for each visitor. In the case of a CMS, the dynamic nature of a site will involve additional computation (server-side processing) and bulkier libraries.
Plugins, extensions, and themes have been carefully reviewed and selected to maximize interoperability, accessibility, and performance. They are regularly audited over time to ensure continued compatibility.
All the components of the user-interface are the subject of special attention in terms of its sustainability impact while respecting accessibility and the performance of such components.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.21
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Carefully considering long-term technology implications and taking the time to ensure they are optimized and efficiently utilized can help a team measurably reduce a product or service's environmental impact over time, which will reduce overall emissions.
- Security: Maintaining a software product over time and ensuring that the only third-party products you use are critical, and your service improves security.
- Privacy: Prioritizing security and user privacy helps an organization better comply with current and emerging related legislation.
- Accessibility: Making assistive technologies a core part of project specifications from the beginning and throughout a product or service's life-cycle improves access to information for people with disabilities.
- Performance: Avoiding unnecessary complexity in your infrastructure will increase the speed at which developers can work, but also reduce the overhead load of website performance, increasing the benefits relating to emission reduction.
- Economic: Avoiding tooling which may be overburdening the user-experience may have financial savings, especially if certain tooling has maintenance costs or fees for software usage.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
You can view a comparison of more performant (headless) content management systems or download the sustainability Figma Kit.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Ideation, Compatibility, Performance, Strategy
Languages evolve regularly, and it's important for security and performance reasons to keep on top of the technology stack you are using. It's also important to consider whether the language you are using is appropriate or optimized for the task you wish to use it for.
Use the latest build of your chosen syntax language and its coupled framework.
Use the most appropriate programming language for a task. Many tools and programming languages are optimized for performing particular tasks, and utilizing those most appropriate to the problem, especially if there is a reasonable visitor base involved justifies the time and effort, as long as it doesn't impact PPP factors such as the well-being of those involved or become too cost prohibitive.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.22
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Using the latest language version may improve efficiency and reduce data center energy consumption. Verify benefits are worthwhile before major build upgrades.
- Security: Often, older versions may have security issues that could expose your website or app (and thereby your visitors) to harm. Maintaining an upgrade schedule is good for security.
- Performance: Language version updates are usually coupled with performance improvements. Regarding language choice, an algorithm implemented in a compiled language such as C or Rust, for example, can have greatly reduced execution time and energy usage compared to the same algorithm written in an interpreted language like Python or JavaScript.
- Economic: Using the latest and more performant language version could help hosting companies reduce their costs. That could be beneficial for the company and the visitor.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Use benchmarks to identify the efficiency of languages.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Compatibility, Performance, Security
Ensuring that your code is free of redundancy by using pre-existing functionality provided by the web browser is important as it will help you to reduce the amount of time wasted, re-creating the same components, this offers obvious sustainability benefits in terms of time in front of the screen.
Use native functions, APIs, and features over writing your own.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.23
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Avoiding repetition of pre-existing features improves efficiency, which ultimately will lead to less redundancy, less development time, and thereby emissions saving for the construction of the product or service.
- Performance: Native features will have been well optimized, it's unlikely a custom component will match this, therefore a native function will not only load quicker but will use fewer resources.
- Economic: Existing features don't require additional development time, so is a time saver.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
HTML dialog API example.
<button >open dialog</button>
<dialog id="dialog">
<p>I'm a dialog.</p>
<form method="dialog">
<button>Close</button>
</form>
</dialog>
PHP example.
<?php
$ar1 = array(10, 100, 100, 0);
$ar2 = array(1, 3, 2, 4);
array_multisort($ar1, $ar2);
var_dump($ar1);
var_dump($ar2);
?>
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Patterns, Compatibility, HTML, CSS, JavaScript
Making multiple requests whether HTTP or within a database has a carbon cost as infrastructure has to send that information back and forth. As such, managing how you store and use data locally for a visitor will help reduce wasted cycles.
If you need information that is stored in a database, and you require it (or it's likely to be requested) more than once in your code, access the database only once, and store the data locally for subsequent processing. Also, avoid reliance on framework helpers that might defer filtering to later on in the process.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]3.24
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Filtering out unneeded data at a deeper level of the application may reduce energy usage, as less processing is required for (de)serialization.
- Performance: By holding the data locally rather than remotely, you can avoid waiting for an additional HTTP request to occur to process the string. Relational databases and other specialist data stores are generally heavily optimized for data filtering and retrieval. Performing transformations at this level of the application may lead to reduced CPU time and faster responses.
- Economic: Rather than pushing multiple additional demands to the server (which could lead to stress failures and lost business), an optimized codebase can reduce bandwidth overheads.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
$value = get_post_meta( int $post_id, string $key = '', bool $single = false ): mixed
Source: get_post_meta Function.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Performance, Networking
DevOps (Developer Operations) and hosting providers work to ensure that the infrastructure for a product or service meets its demands. Having the ability to decide where content will be housed along with managing its interaction with browsers provides numerous sustainability-related decisions of benefit to all.
Being able to manage infrastructure allows individuals to:
- Find sustainable providers for hosting, CDNs, and other third-party solutions.
- Settings can be managed from the back-end for caching, compression, and error handling.
- Tasks can be handled optimally by having good processes in place.
By adhering to the below guidelines, individuals can make a significant difference in the reduction of back-end sustainability impacts.
Plain language summary of Hosting, Infrastructure and Systems
- Pick a green host, on a plan you need, that scales, and is where you require it.
- Optimize your files, remembering to handle file errors appropriately.
- Automate services where you can.
- Manage and allow processing and storing data with care.
In addition to reducing the environmental impacts of a website, choose a hosting service that mitigates the remaining impacts. To make sure of this, there are many criteria to look for.
To assess the environmental impacts of hosting and detect overconsumption, some indicators are monitored: energy / water usage, CPU / Memory usage, allocation of servers and CPU cores, etc. These indicators are used to calculate metrics directly related to environmental impacts, such as Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE). They are displayed to visitors for transparency and monitoring reasons.
Equipment is managed responsibly by keeping it as long as possible, using it as efficiently as possible, making sure it is certified, and purchasing long-lifespan products.
Waste (including equipment) is recovered, recycled, and upcycled.
Electricity comes entirely from sources with the lowest possible carbon intensity (ideally generated by wind or solar rather than from non-renewable sources). For example, Renewable Energy Credits (RECs) can help verify the source, or, ideally, prove that electricity comes directly from renewable sources.
Remaining emissions are compensated, keeping in mind that the priority should be to avoid then reduce them and only compensate for them if they cannot be avoided. Carbon credits may not be sustainable, therefore the effectiveness of an offset solution must be verified, shown to be both environmentally viable and sustainable, and part of a longer-term strategy to eliminate emissions entirely from a chain, benefitting the wider ecosystem.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.1
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Helps in detecting overconsumption, reduces the environmental impacts of equipment (such as embodied carbon, for instance), and reduces the environmental impacts related to the production of consumed electricity.
- Economic: Reduces the quantity of equipment needed to be purchased.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Some hosting companies display their PUE / WUE. In addition to being a good way for users and possible customers to get insight into this, it is also a good lever to incite competitors to do the same. The Green Hosting Directory from the Green Web Foundation offers a list of hosting companies that claim to use only renewable energies.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Hardware, Networking
Browser caching reduces the requirement for files to need to be constantly reloaded from the server, and in certain situations, it can even allow for files to be viewed offline (or in the case of a reverse proxy, send immediate recurring requests without additional calculation or computation from the server). As such, this will have sustainability and performance benefits (for instance by greatly reducing Time-To-First-Byte).
If using a CMS, install an applicable plugin to enable on-the-fly server-side caching. Otherwise, use the provided server configuration files to include and tweak the file-type cache expiration using expires, bfcache, or cache-control HTTP header. If using a language or framework that generates pages on request, cache responses for static pages so that they can be reused for future visitors.
Client-side JavaScript uses a combination of ServiceWorkers, WebWorkers, storage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), or cookies (if necessary) to streamline the user-journey. For example, through the use of a PWA (Progressive Web Application) to ensure that an offline version is available and accessible at all times to reduce inequality and improve accessibility.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.2
- High
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Social Equity: Allows websites to be functional in regions where no or intermittent Internet connectivity is available.
- Performance: Unmodified files don't need to constantly be redownloaded (saving bandwidth, and server-side caching reduces the amount of computing resources required (as fewer HTTP requests will likely be submitted). Also, being selective over cached content balances faster reloads over the need to request new pages, which means that visitors may experience less latency due to data being held for repeat requests.
- Economic: Reduced data transfer allows for savings for individuals on a monitored data plan and infrastructure costs for the provider.
- Conversion: Caching increases repeat visitor page-load speeds (a customer benefit).
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
HTTP expires headers can be used to control the response.
Expires: Wed, 01 Jun 2023 08:00:00 GMT
Apache and NGINX boilerplates are available.
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive on
# Default: Fallback
ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 year"
# Specific: Assets
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 1 week"
ExpiresByType application/rss+xml "access plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/json "access"
</IfModule>
Source: htaccess Server MIME Type Control.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Assets, HTML, JavaScript, Performance, Networking
Every file will take up a certain amount of room on a server's hard drive, and this data will need to be sent across the wire to each visitor. Doing so will consume resources, but by using compression algorithms you can shrink each file to make its journey less impactful.
If using a CMS, install an applicable plugin to enable on-the-fly server-side compression, such as Brotli or GZIP. Otherwise, use the provided server configuration files to include and tweak the performance-related features to the requirements.
Compress your various images, fonts, audio, and video; by reducing the quality and offering different resolutions / dimensions (sizes) before uploading to a server or content management system.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.3
- High
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Social Equity: Reduced reliance on a high-speed connection (which in many locations is unavailable).
- Accessibility: People with accessibility needs are disproportionately affected by poverty and lower levels of income and thereby are more likely to be unable to afford either a high speed or the high cost of data plans found on cellular networks and satellite providers.
- Performance: Reduced data consumption (with a slight increase in visitor CPU decompression with server-side techniques).
- Economic: Reduced data transfer allows for savings for individuals on a monitored data plan.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
HTTP compression headers can be used to control the response.
Accept-Encoding: zstd, gzip, br, deflate
Apache and NGINX boilerplates are available.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_filter.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE "application/atom+xml application/javascript application/json application/ld+json application/manifest+json application/rdf+xml application/rss+xml application/schema+json application/geo+json application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/wasm application/x-font-ttf application/x-javascript application/x-web-app-manifest+json application/xhtml+xml application/xml font/eot font/opentype font/otf font/ttf image/bmp image/svg+xml image/vnd.microsoft.icon image/x-icon text/cache-manifest text/calendar text/css text/html text/javascript text/plain text/markdown text/vcard text/vnd.rim.location.xloc text/vtt text/x-component text/x-cross-domain-policy text/xml"
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
AddEncoding gzip svgz
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
Source: htaccess GZIP Settings.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Assets, Performance, Networking
Navigation errors lead to mistakes, which lead to visitors wasting time trying to resolve them, or abandoning a website altogether. Anything that can be done to interject, predict, and way-find around potential problems will reduce emissions over time.
Maintain sites by ensuring links are correct, and if errors occur, provide suitable way-finding within optimized pages for each error type to ensure resources can be identified to help visitors complete the task they started.
Redirect websites, subdomains, and pages only when necessary. Proactively seek broken or outdated links and fix them. A redirect or search will often help reduce the number of pages a visitor needs to load.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.4
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: While errors and redirects should be avoided, it's not likely possible. Therefore, having the page's visitor's encounter optimized will hopefully reduce their frustration (and thereby their time on screen trying to pick a new route - or worse, giving up).
- Transparency: Problems can occur, having failsafe mechanisms in place prevents the visitor from being blamed, and it gives them a direction to move once they encounter an error.
- Accessibility: Error pages matter, they can help lost individuals find their path, and providing useful navigation and appropriate signage can reduce the loss of abandonment. This can be especially useful for individuals with cognitive impairments who may have reached such a location due to forgetting where a resource was located, being unable to spell the URL correctly, or finding themselves at a dead end due to confusion.
- Performance: Redirects used appropriately can help visitors find a resource that has been moved quickly.
- Conversion: Visitors are less likely to abandon a website if they can find an instant solution.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Apache and NGINX boilerplates are available.
ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
Source: htaccess Error Documents.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, UI, Usability, Compatibility, Networking, Marketing
Decommission or switch off additional environments, such as testing / QA (Quality Assurance) / re-production and other such environments when they are not useful.
Ensure no unused environment is available, balancing the cost of deploying an environment with the cost of keeping it online while unused.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.5
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Avoids consuming resources for unused services.
- Economic: Unused services should not be paid for, resulting in savings.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Website testing environments should not be automated but run on command.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Performance, Hardware, Software, Networking
Any tasks, especially repetitive, that can be automated should be automated (compilation, deployment, tests, etc.) to reduce time at the computer being wasted by people.
Every recurring task, such as deployment, testing, or compilation, is run automatically, as recommended by continuous integration / continuous delivery best practices.
To reduce wasted processing cycles, every automated task is only run when needed.
Automated scaling infrastructure is used to automatically increase the capacity of the web server and buffering / throttling is implemented to respond to visitor demand.
Web browsing from bots has been steadily increasing in recent years. As such, it is a growing concern for security, performance, and sustainability. Use security tools that automatically block bad actors and minimize bad behavior. This results in substantially less load on the server, fewer logs, less data, less effect due to compromise, and more. The result of compromised websites is a large increase in HTTP, email, and other traffic as malicious code attempts to infiltrate other resources and exfiltrate data. Compromised websites are typically identified by anomalous patterned behavior.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.6
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: These practices can reduce the resources necessary to execute tasks, which can also result in reduced emissions.
- Operations: When coupled with upskilling and cross-training, automation can also improve team performance and operational efficiency.
- Economic: Automation can help reduce organizational costs.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Cleaning up bad bots can improve sustainability.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Performance, Software
Only send data from the server when the visitor needs it. As much as possible, you can rely on client-side or server-side cache and client-side / local storage. Rather than refreshing data on a given frequency, it might be up to the visitor to manually ask for a refresh.
The frequency for refresh (of both the cache, locally stored data, and the page) is defined depending on visitor needs.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.7
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Caching reduces energy consumption for both servers and end-user devices. This reduces emissions.
- Economic: Caching can potentially reduce costs by reducing the amount of data transmitted over the network.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
When displaying an estimated time of arrival for a bus, it should be refreshed no more than once per minute.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Usability, JavaScript, Performance, Networking
For security reasons and in accordance with a Service-Level Agreement (SLA), it is often recommended to duplicate data to make sure it remains available if a problem occurs. This should be balanced with the cost of such duplication. Not all data is critical and, rather than overcompensating with multiple saves, duplication should be designed with efficiency in mind.
Backups of system and user data are both incremental and secure.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.8
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Limiting redundancy reduces the amount of consumed resources.
- Economic: Limiting redundancy can reduce the induced storage costs.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Incremental backups contain only files that have been modified or changed since the last backup. Furthermore, backups older than a specified amount of time are removed. A classic example of a backup maintenance strategy is the 3-2-1 technique.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
- AWS WAF
- SUS04-BP03 - Use policies to manage the lifecycle of your datasets
- SUS04-BP05 - Remove unneeded or redundant data
- SUS04-BP08 - Back up data only when difficult to recreate
- [*]4.8 [GPFEDS]
- 1.6 - Strategy (Data Collection)
- 7.2 - Back-End (Data Retention)
- 8.8 - Hosting (Hot / Cold Data)
- 8.9 - Hosting (Duplicate Data)
- [*]4.8 [GR491]
Tags
Performance, Hardware
Depending on carbon intensity, some processes and communications should be delayed and sometimes batched. This could also be a way to reduce the workload on a server or Virtual Machine (VM). In such cases, visitors should be warned that the process is asynchronous and notified when it is over.
By default, non-critical processes and communications are batched and launched only when carbon intensity is under a given threshold.
The communication protocols used are relevant to the visitor's needs and data transferred. Avoid using insecure protocols (HTTP, FTP), and prioritize more efficient and privacy-aware data routes for visitors (HTTPS, SSH).
When creating products or services that utilize state changes (without triggering a complete refresh), if the utilization of Event-Driven Architecture and Microservices will be more environmentally friendly (based on the PPP variables involved) than traditional APIs in handling the server-side workload of your solution, use it.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.9
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: The potential reduction in a workload by running processes in batches could help reduce the intensity of peak hardware thrashing, thereby reducing the energy requirements and potentially even the water requirements for cooling (due to excess heat generation).
- Social Equity: Leaving non-critical processes to run during quieter periods may reduce the opportunity for sites or services to experience downtime or slowdown due to being overburdened.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
When the visitor asks for the generation of a downloadable file, the visitor is informed that the request will be handled asynchronously and given an estimation of the maximum time it will take. When the file is available, the visitor receives a communication in the most sustainable manner, such as an SMS. As such, it is better if the file is made available online and then deleted after a given amount of time. Ideally, the visitor should be given the option to cancel the request.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
JavaScript, Performance, Networking
Edge caching and CDN delivery can help optimize the sustainable delivery of digital services by optimizing how your website's traffic is transferred over the internet.
When building for a globally distributed audience, use a CDN to store and serve simple read-only, pre-generated resources in a fast and efficient manner. Although they definitely can increase performance, it is also another layer of infrastructure that needs to be considered for sustainability.
Verify that the CDN provides a commitment to sustainability.
A hosting provider was chosen with servers located close to the visitor.
Don't use the service to host dynamic resources or JavaScript (unless through a first-party host) as due to cache partitioning, cross-origin resource sharing (CORS), and other browser mechanics, any benefits are negated by weaker performance, the inability to cache or interact, and the potential introduction of security and privacy issues to be introduced. This doesn't affect JSON or other static assets.
All information passed between the layers of an application incurs a cost, both in terms of data transferred, and CPU cycles for (de)serialization. Wherever possible, data transformations must be performed close to the source to reduce these costs and avoid processing data that will later be discarded.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.10
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Reduces the amount of time spent in front of the device as the delivery of assets can occur quicker (due to servers being closer to the device), which in turn will drain the consumers' device battery-less.
- Social Equity: Benefits visitors in normally underserved geographies and economies, or from disadvantaged backgrounds, as content may be available in a region closer to their location.
- Performance: Visitors experience less latency due to the distance between them and the server is reduced.
- Economic: Content delivery networks work on economies of scale, and their data transfer rates are often cheaper than those of many hosting providers.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
A hosting provider speed and performance statistics tool.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Performance, Hardware, Networking
Select infrastructure with minimal specifications meeting business requirements of performance, availability, etc.
Select infrastructure elements with the lowest requirements tier, meeting your service-level agreements. Avoid over-provisioning multi-datacenter, multi-zone, or distributed deployments if standalone instances meet the requirements. Also avoid provisioning infrastructure that will be under-utilized by provisioning for established average loads, ensuring reasonable resource utilization and autoscaling occurs as needed. Avoid provisioning for peak loads.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.11
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Reduces the size and intensity of the compute.
- Economic: The right-sized compute will typically be the cheapest solution.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Have scheduled automatic scale-up during business hours, and scale-down afterward. Alternatively, have autoscaling (up and down) in direct response to traffic.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Performance, Hardware, E-Waste
Optimize storage of data according to what is most important, relevant, and required in service to visitors. This will help to avoid unnecessary storage of data that may not be useful or valuable, which will reduce required infrastructure, power, and data transfer.
Remove unnecessary and redundant data from your servers, whether it is single-use (dark data) or abandoned.
Create data with an expiration date. Excess data is a form of technical debt, and routinely cleaning up old data needs to be normalized.
Use a data classification / tagging policy to make it easier to find, handle, and remove.
Store data only when it is difficult to recreate.
Optimize log collection, storage (off-site), and rotation; scheduling during low-activity hours and using carbon-neutral backup providers.
Ensure long-term assets, especially those of a large size, are made available for download.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]4.12
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Reduced storage usage results in reduced storage requirements.
- Security: Reduced storage of personal information reduces the risk of compromise.
- Economic: Reduced storage usage will result in reduced prices.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
HTTP compression headers can be used to control the response.
Accept-Encoding: zstd, gzip, br, deflate
Apache and NGINX boilerplates are available.
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
<IfModule mod_headers.c>
SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_filter.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE "application/atom+xml application/javascript application/json application/ld+json application/manifest+json application/rdf+xml application/rss+xml application/schema+json application/geo+json application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/wasm application/x-font-ttf application/x-javascript application/x-web-app-manifest+json application/xhtml+xml application/xml font/eot font/opentype font/otf font/ttf image/bmp image/svg+xml image/vnd.microsoft.icon image/x-icon text/cache-manifest text/calendar text/css text/html text/javascript text/plain text/markdown text/vcard text/vnd.rim.location.xloc text/vtt text/x-component text/x-cross-domain-policy text/xml"
</IfModule>
<IfModule mod_mime.c>
AddEncoding gzip svgz
</IfModule>
</IfModule>
Source: htaccess GZIP Settings.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Performance, Hardware, E-Waste, Privacy
For anyone who owns or operates a website or application, there are practical considerations behind such decisions, and these can have sustainable impacts. While business owners are likely to be those involved in higher-level decisions, benefits can still be found for individuals working on the Internet.
Being involved in the management of a product or service gives you certain abilities:
- You can influence the way a product or service is developed to be more sustainable.
- The ability to raise awareness, and publicly disclose and report your efforts.
- You can impact change within a business and within its workers to meet PPP targets.
By adhering to the below guidelines, individuals can make a significant difference in the reduction of non-technical sustainability impacts.
Plain language summary of Business Strategy and Product Management
- Plan and have policies and statements in place to cover sustainability events.
- Have someone in charge of sustainability. Inform and train others.
- Understand your impact. Set goals and targets. Report, verify, and disclose your progress.
- If a project is necessary, document its evolution and manage its lifespan.
- Share benefits with your workers. Share decision-making with everyone.
- Be ethical with sensitive materials like data or emerging technology (like AI).
- Be an inclusive workplace. Also, give back to good causes and open source.
Create a publicly available statement in an easy-to-find location on your website that outlines a clear commitment to prioritize ethics and sustainability PPP standards that align with the organization's mission, vision, and values and include statements specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs. This should be done while actively promoting such efforts (with evidence) using social channels.
The organization has published a publicly available Code of Ethics, Product Guidelines, Sustainability, or PPP Statement that includes language specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs.
Achievements, features, compliance, and anything beyond the scope of these guidelines are published within a sustainability section of your product or service.
Evidence is provided by the organization showing how it effectively governs implemented digital sustainability, climate policies, and related PPP practices over time.
Training decks and workshops are provided by the organization for onboarding new team members on how it implements more sustainable product strategies.
Your methodology has been documented through impact storytelling, documentation, and helping individuals make more informed decisions in order to raise awareness with your visitors.
The organization can show how it powers digital products and services with renewable energy.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.1
- High
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: A clear sustainability statement should make it easier to align organizational policies and practices with measurable metrics to support goals. And, if included early in digital product strategy, can benefit from improved efficiency and reduced environmental impact.
- Privacy: By trying to reduce your emissions, and explaining to a wider audience how you aim to keep your sustainability promises, you can also highlight other key areas of visitor value as ethically important, such as privacy and security (which will gain visitor trust in your brand).
- Transparency: A clear, public-facing set of policies helps internal and external stakeholders better understand an organization's commitments.
- Social Equity: Highlighting intersectional social issues in documentation, storytelling, and marketing materials raises awareness of both problems and potential solutions.
- Accessibility: Prioritizing inclusive design both in user-interfaces and storytelling raises awareness of accessibility barriers, improves experience for people with disabilities, and will reduce emissions by reducing barriers to access which may trigger wasted traffic.
- Economic: Transparent communication on how an organization shares the economic benefits of its digital work raises awareness of social inequalities. Similarly, helping visitors make more informed decisions can support a more financially sustainable product or service overall. A clear statement of intent will also make it easier for the company to measure and report on its impact efforts.
- Operations: Product teams are more engaged in the work they're doing.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
Here are some great examples of a Code of Ethics, an Ethical Policy, a corporate digital responsibility document, a sustainability template, a sustainability policy, a code of conduct, and in Italian, a range of useful policy examples (PDF): A code of Conduct, Ethics, Environment, and Marketing.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Research, Education, Strategy, KPIs
Having someone within an organization who represents sustainability as a core agenda makes good sense due to the accessibility, performance, financial, and other benefits that can occur from following best practices.
An ecological referee (with specific digital expertise) for the product or service within your organization has been assigned.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.2
- Medium
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: A referee will maintain quality assurance and guide decisions that measurably reduce the environmental impact of the organization's digital products and services.
- Privacy: They will maintain intersectional data privacy standards and potentially watch out for legal compliance issues within the organization.
- Social Equity: A representative will help to reduce the digital divide and improve access to information for visitors with older devices, in low-bandwidth areas, and so on. This reduces emissions as less e-waste will be produced if the need for newer equipment becomes less of a priority.
- Accessibility: The sustainability representative will help the organization improve issues surrounding barriers to access. These inherently could cost bandwidth, have a monetary value, and have potential legal implications.
- Economic: A dedicated resource who maintains quality control will ultimately improve the organization's financial standing.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Microsoft's sustainability team and journey.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Education, Marketing
Allowing the visitor to take action to reduce their emissions is key to helping them play a part in becoming more sustainable. By helping them identify when choices they make could have an environmental impact (and by how much) and then providing them with the tooling choices to reduce their footprint, you can empower them to make a lasting difference.
The ecological implications of visitor choices have been clearly communicated and visitors can configure settings based on those choices.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.4
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: More ecologically friendly software settings are designed to improve the environmental impact of a product or service. Empowering the visitor will also allow you indirectly to reduce emissions.
- Performance: Sustainability is inherently tied into accessibility and web performance, as such the benefits these fields bring can have a positive impact on the way your website or application works.
- Conversion: By clearly communicating the impact, allowing the visitor to set preferences can potentially encourage more individuals to make ecologically friendly choices, thereby increasing adoption rates from those who look for sustainable or ethical brands.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Using CSS media queries, you can adjust the layout of a website based on ecological preferences such as color, data, animation, and more.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Education, Reporting
Being able to identify key issues with your website or application is essential, and while not a foolproof method, using tooling can help you achieve an overall idea about the state of your product or service's environmental state (as such tools can do for accessibility).
A full life-cycle Analysis based on the functional unit defined in Guideline 5.15 has been conducted.
The environmental impact of your or your competitor's current service to inform decision-making (as a potential target goal) has been calculated.
When identifying the environmental impact of your product or service, you must include the impact (or estimates of) of any tooling used to create the product or service along with any third-party solutions utilized in the pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions they generate from production to maintenance are considered integral to your overall solution.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.5
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Given their rigor, LCAs offer the biggest opportunities to reduce a digital product or service's overall environmental impact through the identification and elimination of variables and vectors of digital emissions.
- Social Equity: While LCAs are primarily concerned with environmental impacts, they can incorporate intersectional social metrics as well to improve and consider issues like inequality which affect sustainability.
- Accessibility: Auditing for accessibility can potentially be included as a key part of a digital LCA, as long as parameters are defined upfront (such as WCAG conformance) and maintained throughout the project to ensure barriers to access are eliminated.
- Performance: Because they are so detailed, following LCA recommendations should improve product performance due to optimizations being quickly identified and checked off based on best practices.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Use an online carbon website footprint-checking tool such as EcoGrader, EcoPing, FootSprint, Sitigreen, or Website Carbon.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Research, Strategy, KPIs
Define sustainability goals for the organization to meet and incorporate into its business model. Pair each goal with at least one clear, achievable metric or Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
The organization has defined and published a clear set of sustainability goals. It publicly communicates how it will meet these goals, including which performance metrics are important to help the organization and its various stakeholders thrive.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.6
- Low
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Setting, measuring, and communicating clear sustainability goals aligns an organization's impact aspirations with ongoing efforts to meet these goals.
- Transparency: Helps stakeholders such as employees, clients, and partners better understand how the organization creates shared value in its various sustainability policies and programs.
- Economic: Aligning with existing standards or frameworks makes it easier for organizations to include digital in their overall sustainability reporting.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Here is a list of sustainability goals in the form of a checklist.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Research, Governance, KPIs
Business certifications can fill the gaps left by incomplete sustainability legislation. Ensuring a business complies with third-party certifications will help verify and apply an objective level of rigor to an organization's sustainability efforts.
The organization has achieved one or more business sustainability certifications and incorporated operational policies and practices to support them.
The organization maintains its certification through evolving policies and practices over time.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.7
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Operations: These types of certifications can make it easier for organizations to align operational practices with their mission, vision, and values and communicate these decisions to organizational stakeholders.
- Economic: Business certifications, which are overseen by impartial governing bodies, help organizations operationalize sustainability principles and achieve higher verified levels of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency. These certifications can also help an organization differentiate itself from others in its industry. However, organizations should be sure to vet the certifying entity so no conflicts of interest exist.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
A common form of certification in the Web development field for individuals valuing inclusive design is the Certified Professional in Web Accessibility.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Governance, KPIs
The organization has clear onboarding and training processes that include PPP policies and practices with explicit references to digital sustainability and responsibility. Ensure that onboarding utilizes a "green by default" process and avoids being an opt-in procedure. This applies equally at an organizational level and to visitors and consumers of your products and services.
The organization has dedicated training manuals, workshops, and materials that outline the PPP policies and practices it follows and how to implement them. While managing and maintaining these materials over time, adapting them as new policies and practices arise.
The organization incentivizes leadership, teams, and stakeholders to make progress toward the goals outlined in their training, including time for sustainability activities, recognition for completion, and so on.
The organization anticipates and maps potential negative external variables on the service, and acts to minimize their overall impact.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.8
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Economic: Organizations with sustainability training and onboarding practices in place benefit from higher retention rates, improved performance, and more resilient standards of practice for maintaining business continuity.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
An academic organization providing staff sustainability opportunities and resources.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Education, Strategy
The organization discloses and reports its PPP impact on at least an annual basis.
The organization has created and published policies and practices for disclosing the social and environmental impacts of its products, services, policies, and programs in line with existing reporting standards such as GRI Performance, SASB, etc.
The organization produces a publicly available impact report outlining its progress against previous reports on social and environmental goals at least once per year.
The organization publicly and transparently follows existing or emerging environmental standards and legislative policy that promotes mandatory disclosures and reporting for emissions. This is done alongside other social and environmental criteria in its impact reporting, maintaining these practices over time for future reports.
The organization clearly identifies how it reduces its environmental impact, avoiding double accounting, greenwashing, excluded data, or other manipulative techniques.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.9
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: As reporting standards become more rigorous and commonplace, early adopters find the transition less disruptive due to more resilient business operations. Organizations that commit to these practices long-term will also be ahead of the curve as legislation catches up.
- Economic: Organizations that regularly report on their impact, and show measurable improvement over time, are increasingly likely to attract employees, partners, potential customers, investors, and suppliers based on shared values and an aligned mission. Customers are more likely to purchase products from ethical companies with a proven environmental record.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Kinaxis (PDF) and Pinterest (PDF) have published their global impact reports.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Reporting, KPIs
An Impact Business Model enables an organization to incorporate specific impact initiatives into one or more business models for generating revenue, often making them "green by default" and folding impact initiatives into the organization's operating system. Moreover, being able to calculate the return on investment in terms of sustainability your product or service will bring is important to identifying whether it poses a net-positive or net-negative effect on the environment.
The organization has completed (and operationalized) a Theory of Change process with requisite documentation to identify the impact it hopes to create, how it will generate revenue, shared, or added value from these activities, how it will measure results based on desired outcomes; or in the case of launched projects, is generating revenue, actively tracking and measuring progress against any desired outcomes.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.10
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Business models based on advertisement, sponsorship, or the selling of products can be contradictory to some guidelines as they tend to increase the time spent using a product or service. Taking decisions not only based on financial indicators but on benefiting the visitor and the wider ecosystem can help prevent this and reduce overall emissions.
- Social Equity: Adding social indicators (such as the shared value within digital services) can prevent negative social impacts such as impoverishment or exploitation.
- Economic: Organizations that implement these practices create positive social and environmental impacts with every sale of a product or service. These practices also make it easier for the organization to track and measure progress over time. Understanding and incorporating shared value into a digital product or service can also improve trust, which often leads to improved financial considerations.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
Mightybytes published a Theory for Change template.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Ideation, Research, Strategy
The organization has clearly defined governance policies around how it manages and maintains digital products and services over time.
The organization has documented policies outlining how it approaches product management and maintenance.
The organization has maintenance / security plans in place for all the digital products and services it manages.
The organization appropriately resources products over time via staffing and budgeting to support refactoring code, addressing technical debt, new product features, ongoing testing, and product or service maintenance plans to continue supporting its customers, visitors, and other stakeholders.
The organization incorporates carbon and resource measurement into maintenance programs and can show measurable improvement over time.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.11
- High
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: This provides another opportunity to manage and reduce emissions over time.
- Performance: Products at these organizations also have better security, reduced technical debt, and improved data privacy, and customer retention.
- Economic: Organizations with clear product maintenance and management practices tend to be more resilient in the face of digital disruption.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
An example of a website maintenance checklist.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Compatibility, Strategy
The organization has policies and practices in place to embrace experimentation, foster a growth mindset, support organizational agility, and provide continuous improvement. Product creators should iterate, regularly, though never at the cost of getting things done (such as working on larger, long-term features).
The organization has created policies and practices to enable continuous improvement and has resourced the organization appropriately to support these efforts over time.
Agile sprints and update frequency have gone through a review process to ensure project teams have enough time to conduct user-research, identify technical debt, and produce quality output.
A track record of continuous improvement (iteration) usage to analyze your website or application while also addressing the by-products and potential consequences of ongoing experimentation, such as technical debt, product performance, emissions, and related issues is clearly visible. Analytics are limited to only necessary features to aid with decision-making, encouraging visitor feedback, and comparing performance against business goals and visitor needs.
The retention of existing features, the creation of new functionality, and the decommission or elimination of unused functionality, and unvisited pages through the product's life cycle have been justified and prioritized on a case by case basis.
Corrective security and policy updates during the product or service lifecycle are provided, while such improvements are distinguished from more extensive evolutionary updates.
Sustainable product and data strategies have been developed with appropriate training techniques. These should help your team (managers, colleagues, etc) build capacity and learn new skills to manage and maintain products and services over time.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.12
- High
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: Focusing on continuous improvement reduces waste and energy use by iteratively identifying opportunities to improve the product or service.
- Operations: A culture of experimentation fosters more innovation. This supports team-building and improves overall organizational resilience and efficiency.
- Security: Products or services that are maintained and updated over time reduce risk and improve security.
- Privacy: Having a high-quality, regularly kept up-to-date product or service will reduce the chances of a data breach, which will in turn increase the privacy potential of the website or application.
- Accessibility: Iteration is important for inclusive design as different visitors will have different needs, and no two individuals are alike. As such, being agile and adaptable will benefit authors in expanding their accessibility.
- Performance: Technical debt is reduced if review processes exist. Focusing on continuous improvement rather than large single-scale releases, bottlenecks in a website or application's speed can be resolved quickly as they become apparent. This is especially useful as new releases of Web browsers can alter the performance of products and services.
- Economic: Agility and continuous improvement help an organization be more resilient in the face of disruption and a changing climate. Long-term, these practices save the organization time, money, and resources. They also provide security benefits that decrease risk and can potentially reduce emissions.
- Conversion: If a website or application renders correctly, it will naturally encourage more trust with its visitors, and thereby have the potential for repeat custom.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
A showcase of how a website layers content, structure, and style. The Sustainable Web Design toolkit provides you with information relating to optimizing your product or service for the environment. The continuous improvement toolkit also has numerous business templates to work from.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
UI, Compatibility, Performance, Security, Strategy, KPIs
Products or services are updated regularly. Ensure that additions, changes, deprecations, removals, fixes, or security patches are documented in an easy-to-read document with details that showcase how such changes affect the visitor (or how they can take advantage of new features).
Adding, updating, or removing features are considered where appropriate to the user-experience of the product or service.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.13
- Low
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: Maintaining an intuitive, lightweight user-experience while adding new features or updating software reduces frustration, churn, and the energy visitors expend when the interface doesn't perform in ways visitors expect.
- Security: Websites and applications that maintain an evergreen status often have fewer issues due to a strong release cycle which not only makes necessary changes but also keeps visitors informed, maintaining transparency.
- Performance: Maintaining an optimized user-experience that is regularly kept current using best practices also implies that pages and assets load quickly in ways visitors expect.
- Economic: Products and services which are left to become outdated may have higher costs to restart the project from scratch and resurrect; whereas small regular updates have a lesser overhead in terms of time commitments from development scheduling and the impact on potential lost consumers.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
# Changelog - Website
## [Unreleased]
- N/A
## 1.0.0 - YYYY-MM-DD
### Added
- Content.
## [Guide]
- Added: New features.
- Changed: Altered functionality.
- Deprecated: Disappearing features.
- Removed: Eliminated features.
- Fixed: Bugs patched.
- Security: Solved vulnerabilities.
Source: Keep A Changelog.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Content, Education, Usability, Compatibility
Ensure that the product or service you are creating offers value to visitors and doesn't duplicate existing functionality (without bringing something new to the table) as this redundancy wastes digital and physical resources.
The product or service identifies within a sustainability statement where it aligns with one of the U.N. (SDGs) and its appropriate targets.
The product or service has been determined as necessary based upon desirability, feasibility, and viability factors.
No existing digital product or service offers the same value. An analysis has been conducted if necessary to understand the market for this requirement.
Any obstacles to using a product or service, such as accessibility, equality, technical, or territorial have been overcome.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.14
- High
- Effort
- Low
Benefits
- Environmental: By determining that a digital product or service is not necessary, you avoid potential environmental impacts associated with its creation and use.
- Operations: Organizations don't waste time or resources creating unnecessary tools that then require ongoing maintenance.
- Social Equity: Organizations avoid increasing the digital divide by creating only digital products and services that are meaningful and necessary.
- Accessibility: As long as an accessible replacement is available, avoiding an unnecessary digital product or service can improve access to existing information.
- Economic: Organizations cut costs by not investing in unnecessary products or services.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
Competitor analysis template to determine the viability of a project.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Ideation, Software, E-Waste, Reporting
The functional unit of a product is a quantified description of the performance requirements that the product fulfills. Ensure you identify the requirements of your product before development.
A life-cycle Assessment (LCA) has been conducted to define the requirements of your product's function throughout its lifecycle.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.15
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: The functional unit enables the comparison of non-equivalent products or services in the assessment of environmental impacts.
- Performance: Focusing on a functional unit drives performance-based choices for a better, more efficient, and faster user-experience.
- Economic: Focusing on the functional unit supports a robust product or service without unnecessary, potentially costly features.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
Recycled Bicycles functional unit (can be adapted for the Web).
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Ideation, Research, Reporting
The organization collaborates with suppliers, authors, clients, and other partners on initiatives that are both mutually beneficial and create positive social and environmental outcomes.
The organization has created specific policies to vet potential partners in its supply chain based on PPP principles.
The organization has partnered with suppliers to create, track, and measure collective impact on issues that impact their stakeholders.
The organization has promoted its partnerships in a publicly available place, along with information on how the partnership creates a collective impact.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.16
- High
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: Vetting suppliers and partners can help an organization define, track, and reduce its Scope 3 emissions.
- Operations: This can increase diversity within the technology sector.
- Economic: This will also help an organization better align its business ecosystem with its mission, vision, and values; whilst improving its relationship with stakeholders.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
How one business goes through a project selection process.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Content, Ideation, Hardware, Governance
The organization shares the economic benefits of its digital products, services, policies, and programs.
The organization is publicly committed to paying employees, contractors, and other stakeholders a living wage.
The organization has policies and practices in place to incentivize stakeholders, such as workers and contractors, to meet its impact goals.
The organization provides benefits to employees in accordance with its resources, including, where relevant, healthcare, retirement planning, flex time, profit sharing, and so on.
The organization advocates for responsible legislation that supports employment rights, transparency, and accountability related to sharing economic benefits.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.17
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Social Equity: Organizations that pay a living wage and offer good benefits often have higher employee retention rates.
- Economic: Organizations that collaborate with stakeholders to coordinate mutually beneficial economic incentives benefit from stronger relationships.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
This article contains 50 different employee perks a business could offer to cultivate a better working environment.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Governance
Ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table is important to promoting voices who may not otherwise have their voices heard, and potentially getting useful ideas from fresh sources.
The project team's goals are aligned with key business objectives, and project stakeholders (for example, project managers) have the power and autonomy to make key decisions on the organization's behalf.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.18
- Low
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Operations: If project teams are incentivized with key sustainability goals and have the authority to make decisions based on such criteria, they can measurably improve a range of metrics within the business, design, development, and infrastructure categories. In doing so, emissions can be reduced through group action and commitment changes at an organizational level.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Proposal software can help authors, clients, and co-workers validate "baked-in" components.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Strategy
The organization has public policies and practices supporting racial justice, inclusion, equity, and diversity in hiring and operations.
The organization has documented its commitment to JEDI practices with clear policies on how it prioritizes marginalized or otherwise underserved communities, including Black, Indigenous, People of Color, LGBTQIA+, Women, Disabled, Veterans, Seniors, and so on.
The organization has an accessibility policy for digital products and services and can show this via a verified accessible website, application, product, or service.
The organization has JEDI-related training materials and schedules ongoing workshops related to how this topic manifests itself in digital products and services (algorithmic bias, digital divide, gig economy work, mis / disinformation, etc).
The organization can show measurable JEDI improvement over time in its hiring, leadership, and operations.
The organization advocates for responsible legislation relating to JEDI practices, especially as related to digital products and services.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.19
- High
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Accessibility: Organizations that incorporate more diverse stakeholder perspectives enact more inclusive policies and often create better products, services, and programs. JEDI practices strengthen an organization's resilience and ability to collaborate. Additionally, this improves diversity in the tech sector and the overall accessibility of the Internet.
- Economic: Organizations with clear JEDI policies and practices have reduced risks of potential legal issues, lawsuits, etc.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
These websites have some good examples of accessibility statements, equality and inclusion, diversity, and, general accessibility.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Accessibility, Ideation, Strategy
Expired or unused data has a cost, takes up space, and requires maintenance. As such, the ability for customers to manage their own data and for service providers to manage older website material which no longer applies but might still have use will be a carbon benefit.
Outdated or otherwise expired product content and data are archived and deleted via automated expiration dates and scheduled product audits. An archiving schedule with a lighter version of the old searchable content is made available.
Users can control, manage, and delete their data, subscriptions, and accounts.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.21
- Low
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: By storing less data, you inherently require less computing power to maintain a service, and this will require less energy within the Internet's infrastructure. This will help to reduce your emissions.
- Privacy: Good data management supports better data protection practices.
- Performance: Putting older information that is less relevant onto a smaller scaled-down version of your website will reduce your bandwidth usage, and it's likely not going to impact visitors as archived information will have significantly fewer visitors.
- Economic: Requiring less data has a potential financial benefit in that the lower storage requirements mean that you can scale down your hosting package or, if on a pay-as-you-go scheme, simply be charged less for your infrastructure costs.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
Ensuring data is archived can prove useful if it's later deleted.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Security, Privacy, Strategy
The organization implements responsible finance strategies, including divesting from fossil fuels and appropriately resourcing digital products and services to account for long-term care and maintenance.
The organization has divested from fossil fuels and moved its banking, sponsorship, and other affiliations to more responsible partners.
The organization engages in flexible financing and responsible budgeting for its digital products and services to accommodate long-term care and maintenance.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.23
- High
- Effort
- High
Benefits
- Environmental: Divesting from fossil fuels moves us more quickly to an economy that is powered by renewable energy, which can reduce the catastrophic impacts of climate change.
- Economic: Responsibly financing digital products and services improves their resilience and saves the organization time, money, and resources eventually.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
A tool that can help you identify a green bank worldwide.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Ideation, Governance
For-profit organizations have clear philanthropy policies and practices in place to help non-profit organizations build digital capacity and acumen while also engaging their own teams in meaningful work that promotes shared learning and stretch goals.
The organization has a clear corporate giving policy and creates philanthropic partnerships with strategically aligned organizations.
The organization engages in free or volunteer projects, which help its team learn new tools and tactics, while also helping charities and non-profit organizations build capacity.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.24
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Operations: Organizations with clear philanthropy strategies that include volunteer or free projects with team stretch goals can have higher employee engagement and retention.
- Economic: Organizations with clear philanthropic strategies often have a system of checks and balances in place that support better overall financial practices.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
The corporate philanthropy practices of Mightybytes.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Content, Governance
Everything ends at some point, planning for if and when a product or service is finalized makes good ethical sense to ensure customers can be transitioned toward a replacement rather than losing access to their data.
Clear, documented end-of-life guidelines exist that include data disposal, archiving, file deletion, etc guidance.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.25
- Medium
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Many products or services keep unnecessary data and functionalities alive while they are not used or useful anymore. Planning for end-of-life reduces their long-term environmental impact by eliminating waste and allowing the freed-up resources to be utilized for other information.
- Security: Regular maintenance, updates, and care on outdated software and data can significantly reduce security risks.
- Privacy: Incorporating clear end-of-life policies that include a visitor's right to be forgotten will benefit the visitor by explaining how you enforce data protection and comply with legislation.
- Performance: Removing unnecessary features, functions, and data of a service improves performance and resilience as the resources which were utilizing data will be better spent on more popular functionality, and the gains made from their elimination will be felt in terms of emissions through saved development time.
- Economic: Removing redundancy in the product or service can generate savings in hosting, security costs, and other third-party subscriptions.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Medium
- GRI 302: Energy
- Medium
- GRI 303: Water
- Medium
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Medium
Example
This is a checklist for product end-of-life care.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Research, Compatibility, Software, E-Waste, Strategy
The organization addresses e-waste, right-to-repair, recycling, and related practices in its operations.
The organization has specific policies in place to recycle e-waste and repair owned technology products whenever possible.
The organization has formed relationships with local partners for e-waste recycling and repair.
The organization buys refurbished equipment whenever possible.
The organization allows consumers to repair (to the best of their ability) the consumables they purchase, offering (if possible at cost) replacement components and provides clear instructions to resolve faults that occur.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.26
- High
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Environmental: Organizations with clear e-waste and recycling policies reduce environmental impact and promote circularity, while also extending the shelf-life of technology hardware. When coupled with clear philanthropic policies, donated hardware can also support resource-constrained charities.
- Economic: Extending the shelf-life of hardware and clear e-waste / recycling policies reduces costs.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- High
- GRI 302: Energy
- High
- GRI 303: Water
- High
- GRI 305: Emissions
- High
Example
The e-waste Policy Toolkit.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Social Equity, Content, Ideation, Hardware, E-Waste, Governance
Resilience of the product or service in case of a disaster or emergency should be ensured to restore and maintain operations in case of disruptions.
The organization has created a plan of action that is regularly reviewed and occasionally tested to determine readiness in case of an incident and has procedures to quickly recover from such issues.
The organization regularly maintains transparent communication with its audience regarding issues that may affect service delivery or user data.
Show / Hide additional content to understand this guideline and its success criteria.
Note
Impact & Effort
- Impact [*]5.29
- Low
- Effort
- Medium
Benefits
- Operations: Transparency around digital resilience procedures will encourage trust that a product or service can be depended upon for critical use.
- Economic: This will ensure limiting the extent of the disruption to the website or application.
- Social: Users will have access to potentially vital online services in case of a disaster or emergency.
Reporting
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
- GRI 301: Materials
- Low
- GRI 302: Energy
- Low
- GRI 303: Water
- Low
- GRI 305: Emissions
- Low
Example
IBM provides some great examples of disaster recovery planning for a range of different situations.
Resources
Resources are for information purposes only, no endorsement is implied.
Tags
Security, Governance, Strategy
Additional information about participation in the Sustainable Web Design Community Group (SWD-CG) can be found within the wiki of the community group.
Alexander Dawson, Andy Blum, Anne Faubry, Arnaud Levy, Ben Clifford, Berwyn Powell, Brett Tackaberry, Brian Louis Ramirez, Chris Adams, Chris Needham, Chris Sater, Chris Wilson, Claire Thornewill, Dennis Lemm, Diogo Abrantes Da Silva, Dom Robinson, Emily Trotter, Fershad Irani, Francesco Fullone, Iain McClenaghan, Ian Jacobs, Ines Akrap, Ismael Velasco, Iulia Raluca Ionita, James Christie, Jeanmonod David, Jennifer Strickland, Jens Oliver Meiert, Jim McCool, Josh Kim, Julien Wilhelm, Laurent Devernay, Leon Brocard, Loren Velasquez, Łukasz Mastalerz, Marie Ototoi, Michelle Barker, Mike Gifford, Morgan Murrah, Nahuai Badiola, Neil Clark, Nick Doty, Nicola Bonotto, Orie Steele, Owen Barton, Romuald Priol, Sandy Dähnert, Shane Herath, Simon Perdrisat, Tantek Çelik, Thibaud Colas, Thorsten Jonas, Tim Frick, Tzviya Siegman, Youen Chéné, Yuna Orsini, Zoe Lopez-Latorre
Aiste Rugeviciute, Andrew Wright, Anthony Vallée-Dubois, Antoine Abélard, Bee Flaherty, Boris Schapira, Brian Sharpe, Carine Bournez, Christophe Clouzeau, Christos Baharakis, Crystal Preston-Watson, Danielle Subject, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Elise West, Florence Maurice, François Burra, Gaël Duez, Gerry McGovern, Greg McDonald, Ignacio Rondini, Ivano Malavolta, James Cannings, James Gallagher, Jan Henckens, Jean Rigotti, Jeffrey Yasskin, Jon Gibbins, Juan Sotés, Julien Robitaille, Kate Mroczkowski, Kimi Wei, Laila Tamani, Leah Goldfarb, Len Dierickx, Lenchi Danch, Louise Towler, Luciene Bulhões Mattos, Luis Tiago, Manfred Jurgovsky, Marie Koesnodihardjo, Mark Butcher, Mert Antinoz, Michelle Sanver, Moritz Guth, Nick Oliveira, Nicolas Lanthemann, Nicolas Oren, Patrick Hypscher, Pietro Jarre, Radu Micu, Rafael Lebre, Rebecca Brocton, Rick Butterfield, Rick Viscomi, Robin Whittleton, Seb Solere, Sylvain Tenier, Thierry Leboucq, Tom Greenwood, Tom Howells, Torsten Beyer, Yelle Lieder.