Finding a starting point

Analytics

With many pages to consider, starting sustainable thinking in digital can be overwhelming. So, I started by assessing analytics to define the high-traffic pages at the time so I could start by focusing on these. After identifying several, I chose the home page as a starting point.

Benchmarking metrics

I used online carbon calculators to assess the carbon output and page laod speed of my home page to set benchmark metrics to improve from.

Sustainable UX assesment

Using sustainable UX best practices as a guide, I assessed the UX and UI elements.

Opportunities:
– Image optimisation: All images were not optimised, sized efficiently.
– Font use: I was using multiple non-system fonts, and not using them sparingly which use more energy to load and render the system fonts
– Colour: My background was mostly white, which uses more energy to display than darker colours
– Plug ins: I was using many plugins for dynamic UX, such as a subscribe filed that was also repeated often across the site

Sustainable UX improvements

I made the following improvements to my home page, one of the highest traffic pages:
– Image optimisation: Converted main PNG Logo (93KB/56KB) and reduced various image sizes
– Reduced custom font use to only headers
– Darkened light backgrounds
– Removed a ‘subscribe’ plugin, swapping it for a button linking to another page where the plugin already existed

Results

These above sustainable design changes resulted in the following improvements:

Sustainable UX improvements

I made the following improvements to my home page, one of the highest traffic pages:
– Removed carousel: Implemented and tested an information carousel, then removed it due to lack of engagement and energy impact
– Identified and merged repetitive links/content
– Replaced images displayed by external URLs with self-hosted optimised and cached images

I also made the following improvements to my entire site:
– Switched to green hosting—I also looked into switching Green Hosting—green hosting providers use renewable energy of carbon offsets to minimise the energy used for hosting sites. After analysing options, I found not many Green Host providers used pure renewable energy, I choose Green Geeks which suited my budget.
– Improved caching
– Automatic file optimisation
– Lazy loading

Results

These above sustainable design changes resulted in the following improvements.

Sustainable UX improvements

Ongoing sustainable UX iterations have resulted in the following results.

Results

These above sustainable design changes resulted in the following improvements.