The Organic Green For Good Pledge

We know that in digital marketing nothing exists in a vacuum: your SEO performance can be impacted by your brand, and your brand can be impacted by your website experience…and on and on it goes. 

And we know it’s the same in every other aspect of life. As the climate change crisis shows us, we can no longer divorce how we live from how we impact the environment, and how that in turn impacts us and other species on our planet.

But how many of us stop to think about the carbon emissions produced by websites, our online activity, watching videos, sending GIFs on Instagram? 

The Internet and related areas that make it a reality (data centres, devices, and so on) produce about the same amount of carbon dioxide emissions as the aviation industry. But we don’t hear anybody talking about reducing how much they watch Netflix.

We’re part of the problem. And we know it.

Now, lest we seem preachy here, we know that we’re part of the problem. We help brands develop websites and deliver better marketing to attract more customers to click on their ads and visit their websites. Before we started cleaning our site up, it was worse than 81% of the rest. See here if you’re part of the problem too.

So in 2022 we made a pledge to clean up our act. And we encourage all brands to do the same. 

This doesn’t mean switching your website off, or making it plain text. There’s no going back from the Internet. Like electricity, the car, and many other incredible advancements that have brought about huge changes to society, the Internet is now part of life, and in many ways it is highly beneficial. But we can always do better: make things less dirty, less exploitative, less impactful. 

Will you join us on our journey?

As businesses we have to take the lead, because it is our products and services that people buy. We are driving the problem. 

We can no longer believe that businesses exist in a profit making vacuum, and are only supposed to make money. Businesses rely on people to create and deliver their products and services, and they rely on people to buy whatever it is that is being sold. So, we have to accept that what we do has a very real impact on people and the planet. To carry on denying it is to keep repeating the insanity that has got us to this point. 

Our pledge

We decided that by the end of 2022 we would have a site that is cleaner than 80% of sites on the internet – and then moving forward we would do all we can to maintain and improve on this number. And we’d do it while still having a beautiful and effective site.

The eight pillars of our pledge

So, here are the things we pledge to do to reduce the carbon impact of our website and make it cleaner than most sites out there: 

1. Our site is green to its core – Hosting and serving up a site, as well as its tech stack, are major contributors to its carbon footprint. We ensure that what sits behind our site is as green as can be.
2. Our code is spotless – Clean and efficient coding ensures sites are as efficient as possible, which means less data transfer and time spent serving it up.
3. If it serves no purpose, it’s gone – The more pages a site has the more bloat and therefore more intensive it is. And most websites are full of bloat. We are always looking to condense, compress, and eradicate pages wherever possible. This will also make it simpler for users to navigate. Win-win. 
4. We’re being smarter with images and video – Data transfer is a massive contributor to a website’s carbon impact. So we are always looking to reduce and eliminate unnecessary video and images. We also investigate cleaner ways to manage and present such content, including modern image formats and more. 
5. We’re proving beautiful doesn’t mean big CO2 impact   – Colours, fonts, and other brand assets all take energy to maintain and serve. So, we look into ways to make our brand greener, which includes changes to how the site looks (dark mode by default for example), and seeing if we can use alternatives to energy intensive brand assets while still having a beautiful site. 
6. We’ve created a super streamlined experience – Time spent on a site clicking around randomly trying to find what you need all adds to data transfer, which adds to carbon impact. We’re always reviewing our site experience and making it tightly aligned to what our users really want, to speed up their journey and make their time on the site more efficient and effective. 
7. Our site is WCAG 2.1 AA compliant – This might seem odd at first, but the fact is that the standards demanded to make a website meet certain accessibility standards also make a site cleaner. And we do go on about this a lot to clients…so we make sure to walk the walk. 
8. We’ll show you how it’s done – We share what we have learnt, and work to raise awareness of the issues surrounding carbon emissions and the Internet. As part of this we’ve built a carbon emissions tool for people to use to get an idea as to how dirty their website is.

The first seven are all about our website, and the steps we would encourage any brand to take to clean up their own site. But that last one is about sharing what we’ve learnt.