Technical expertise and better user experiences
Reducing our clients’ digital carbon footprint
Our commitment to the environment goes beyond our own office (or lack thereof, since we’re a remote-first team).
Impact measured against UN Sustainable Development Goals
It extends to the products we create for our clients. In the digital sector, every website and application has a carbon footprint, and for large charities or public bodies, this can be significant.
Our goal isn’t just to build highly accessible, high-quality digital services, but to build them in a way that is also highly efficient, helping our partners reduce their environmental impact one page view at a time. This focus directly strengthens our impact across the environment and customers B Corp areas.
Results
By focusing intensely on lean design, efficient code, and performance optimisation, we are actively turning this intention into tangible results. Our work involves taking complex, content-heavy services and radically simplifying them – which is a win for both the user experience and the planet.
We have profiled four of our recent high-profile projects to demonstrate this impact:
| Client name | Old website CO₂ per page view (g) | New website CO₂ per page view (g) | % change in carbon emitted | Total CO₂ saved annually (kg) | Equivalent trees planted per year (22kg CO₂ per tree per year) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Communitas Clinics | 1 | 0.08 | -92% | 1,199 | 54 |
| LEF Website & Brand | 0.58 | 0.01 | -98% | 333 | 15 |
| BookTrust | 0.84 | 0.12 | -86% | 10,681 | 485 |
| Access to Justice | 0.34 | 0.04 | -88% | 216 | 10 |
| Total | 12,429 kg | 565 trees | |||
This focus on efficiency has led to impressive reductions in the carbon emitted per page view across all profiled projects, ranging from 86% to a massive 98% reduction.
When we look at the total traffic for these four websites, this work equates to saving a cumulative 12,429 kg of CO2 emissions annually.
To put that into perspective, that’s like planting 546 trees / year or taking the equivalent of more than 12 round-trip transatlantic flights out of the atmosphere by making these websites run better.
This data validates our belief that good, inclusive design is inherently sustainable design.
What’s next?
While we’re proud of these results, we know this is a marathon, not a sprint. We must get better at quantifying and reporting this impact consistently across all our work.
Standardising measurement: We are focused on embedding website carbon tracking as a non-negotiable metric for every project’s success.
Green hosting: We will continue to explore how our recommended hosting solutions can drive down the environmental impact even further, helping our clients to be more transparent about the environmental profile of their entire digital estate.
Our mission is to help our partners achieve theirs, and increasingly, that mission has to be a green one.