Deploy Sustainable Design Best Practices

Cost
LOW
Cost
MEDIUM
Cost
HIGH
EFFORT
low
EFFORT
medium
EFFORT
HIGH
IMPACT
low
IMPACT
MEDIUM
IMPACT
HIGH

Any IT project is made of design steps. Here are some tips to create quick wins:

  • Audit your current website with Website Carbon for a fast overview of your website digital footprint
  • Audit your web flow and delete web pages that users never read
  • Reduce your website weight:
    - remove what is not necessary (images, videos, texts...)
    - choose fonts that are already used on most computers (thus not using more engine power to be uploaded)
    - curb images / videos size and quality
    - design with a reduced number of colors and on degraded level on those colors
  • Have optimized architectures for your softwares in order to save energy usage and server computing power

If you develop your softwares / websites yourself, make sure you follow these easy steps below to follow a sustainable mindset:

  • When designing, think Mobile first and consider what content and which transactions are most essential for a mobile experience. Keep in mind to make the interface lighter and go for UI/UX optimization. In doing so, you will develop less pages, so loading and energy used will be less. Do the same for photo sizing and graphics as mobile experience will demand less weighted images, your overall website pages will use less bandwidth.
  • Prefer dithered images at best
  • Make sure your website is fast to load (less than 3s.)
  • Improve Findability & maximize user paths to find most useful information. The less pages you browse on your website, the less server requests are needed and thus the less carbon footprint it will have.
  • Curb the number of features and be straightforward, relief technical debt by targeting must-have / high value features and cut the rest if you can
  • Get your SEO/SEM right to save time for users

If you wish to go deeper, ask a specialist to help you implement sustainable design Best Practices on your website.

ADDITIONAL RESOURCES

- Audit your current website with Website Carbon for a fast overview of your website digital footprint

‍- Discover Ecometer rules for a Sustainable Design of your website

- More tips on sustainable web design