Keep America Beautiful managed to shift the entire debate around America’s garbage and litter problems away from the industry and onto consumers, and this strategy has been copied time and time again since.

We can think of the distance from the data center to the website’s core user base as “megabyte miles” – and we want it to be as small as possible.

It might be true that the most eco-friendly website is the one that doesn’t exist, but as web designers and developers that’s not particularly helpful advice. We therefore need to use these metrics to challenge ourselves to see how low we can go without compromising the core requirements of the products we’re creating.

Both the emissions of our physical activities and the emissions of our digital projects are truly significant. We cannot pick one and ignore the other as if it doesn’t matter.

This meant prioritizing accessibility, but also optimizing for sustainability. This ethical lens helped them streamline their content around a new set of design guidelines, which drastically reduced the number of words on each page, and reduced the page count from over three hundred to less than seventy- a reduction of roughly 75%. Drayer said the finished product wasn’t only more energy-efficient, but also the most accessible website she had ever created.

Bounce rate: Are you meeting user expectations? When people come to a website from an external source and they leave without visiting any other pages, we refer to this as a bounce.

“Until energy is more expensive, I suspect we will keep thinking of new ways to waste”

The solution is twofold: we need to use the most efficient data centers we can find, but we also need to take responsibility for the applications we host, keeping energy requirements low to minimize their demand on servers.

Low Tech Magazine’s solar version uses a yellow and blue background to indicate the website’s available power. Dithered images help keep file sizes small.

Focus on solving the client’s specific problems first, while using sustainability as a tool to solve those problems.

Using sustainability as a lens in our projects can help deliver services that are more accessible to a wider audience.

That’s a lot of fossil fuel ready to be burned in backup generators when the data center is hit by the worst effects of climate change.

“Customers with the wherewithal to pay for more reliable services will still get [them], and there will be a wider divide between those who do and don’t”

When we pull together approaches such as static web technology, content, delivery networks, offline functionality, and communication

with technologies like SMS, we can create web services that stand up to almost anything.

• WordPress resources:
  • WP Rocket for caching
  • Strattic for static site generation
  • Ecograder, Website Carbon Calculator, The Green Web Foundation database
• Other resources:
  • This Changes Everything – Naomi Klein
  • Design for the Real World
  • Let My People Go Surfing – Yvon Chouinard
  • Design for Sustainability – Tim Frick