At GoCodeGreen, we strive to live up to our own standards, which is why we used our own tools to assess ourselves and take steps to reduce the carbon footprint of our platform and our business.
To be clear, we are running an experiment here. We have built and designed our website ourselves with no agencies involved. We wanted to understand what choices we could make to start making the website more carbon friendly.
I asked our CTO to look at our website performance recently. He confirmed that we had already migrated to Ionos, with their environmental report stating high use of renewable energy (or compensation). This is an interim step for us as we look to rebuild our website then migrate it to a verified green hosting service – though we need to perform checks on validity of claims before this migration takes place. For now we are okay with the Green Web Foundation assessment of the service we have selected as a first step.
For the website itself we knew it needed to be redesigned with the aim of minimising aesthetic sacrifices while eliminating as much video and graphic content as possible to reduce the energy consumption of network transfers. The team has done an excellent job, estimating that we’ve eliminated over 70% of image-heavy assets. We are conscious that we are not yet finished with our streamlining, but this demonstrates that even basic website modifications can help reduce energy consumption.
We’ve now used Ecograder to assess our website. The report provided has highlighted areas where we need to focus, for example our page weights and unused code are causing real problems. We are using WordPress so some elements may be out of our control. Our next steps will be to use the green design techniques in our learning course, with further attention on colour use, images, reuse and simplification of the UX.
I’ll post again when we get through round 2 of our rebuild. I want that Ecograder score of 60 in a better place!
