Karys Staddon, Production, Data & Insight Analyst shares a follow up from her previous ‘Our Environmental Journey’ blog.

Last summer, I got in touch with Kate Mroczkowski at Supercool, our website developers, following the recent blogs and sessions they had shared about their own environmental sustainability journey. It turned out I wasn’t the only one who wanted to pick Kate’s brains about how we could do digital sustainability better! She suggested we join forces for a peer learning project, so alongside the Arts Marketing Association and The WOW Foundation, our digital sustainability project was born...

We came up with the following agreed aims for the project:

1. To benchmark and understand the current digital impact of our websites and identify what we can each improve to reduce their individual carbon footprints.
2. Work on a set of collaborative actions to improve our long-term digital sustainability and monitor their impact.
3. Share the results of our learnings/findings with the arts and culture sector to help improve best practice in this area.

In the spirit of these aims, I wanted to share Orchestras Live’s perspective of tackling this as a small, busy team. Many people I speak to recognise the importance of sustainability and reducing our personal/organisational/global carbon footprint, but once you get into your work ‘zone’ it can feel like there isn’t time to start tackling such a big issue like this when you are faced with an already long to-do list and emails flooding in – where do you even begin? The key for me was to commit to starting, scheduling in small steps, and knowledge-gathering as a starting point.

What I did:

Supercool provided us with an initial sustainability report, highlighting positive aspects of our website set up and design (we only use 2 font types, our website is hosted sustainably via Supercool’s provider, and we don’t use too many unnecessary images and videos), and where we could make improvements (using ‘lighter’ image file types, changing our website background colour from a very energy-intensive white to a lighter grey – which we did!).

The next step was a page weight audit, which I undertook by listing a representative sample of our most viewed pages and looking up the carbon required to load each page (via websitecarbon.com) and multiplying annual page views by page weight to calculate an approximation of our website’s yearly carbon footprint. Here’s what I found:

• Embedded video was the biggest factor in driving up page weight, and the heaviest pages were those with the most embedded videos – mainly project pages 
• Generally, pages without embedded video have consistently light page weight compared to benchmarking data provided by websitecarbon.com  
• Estimated carbon footprint for our website is c.9kg per year, which is pretty light

From this, I experimented with one of our heaviest pages (with lots of embedded videos, mostly found at the end of the page) and found that by changing embedded videos to hyperlinks, not only did the page weight reduce by 67% but the speed load time reduced as well by a whopping 71% making it a better experience for the user too.

What’s next?

We’re working on some green website guidelines that will help shape our approach to maintaining our website sustainably going forward. We’ve got some actions to implement to lighten up some of our heaviest pages and reduce the carbon needed to load them. Once we’ve done that, we’ll run our page weight audit again, and hopefully see the reduction in our website carbon footprint!

We’re also planning to audit our assets on other digital and social platforms, getting rid of unnecessary content.

Our journey is far from over, and we’ve been looking at our organisational carbon footprint and actions we can take more widely to improve our environmental impact in the future. Watch this space…

Resources

Here are some helpful links if you’d like to move forward with your own digital sustainability journey:

• My TeaBreak conversation with Kate from Supercool reflecting on our journey so far in our digital sustainability project
• Supercool’s website has a section dedicated to sustainability with some brilliant resources, guides and reflections to explore
• Websitecarbon.com – pop in a page url and get an instant carbon emission calculation

• Pagespeed.web.dev – are changes to your website improving page load speed? Find out here.