We’ve been creating a series of diary entries about our journey to a cleaner and more eco-friendly website, and this is the next instalment. Check out our full Green For Good pledge here, where we outline eight steps we’re taking to reduce our carbon impact.

Here, we’re looking at pillar 3: If it serves no purpose, it’s gone. This is all about the number of pages a website has – the more there are, the greater the bloat and carbon emissions. Read on to find out the changes we’ve made so far and their impact.

Limiting images on articles – 1st July, 2022 – Jessica Powell 

After temporarily removing articles from our website and optimising their images using the handy tool Kraken, we decided to go a step further and remove images that served no purpose other than looking pretty. 

Now, wherever possible, each blog post or news piece only has a hero image, giving you an idea of whether it’s the type of content you’d like to be reading. Moreover, we make sure the image is fully optimised before we add it to the article. 

Removing unnecessary website content – 6th July, 2022 – Ed Nicholson

As we continue on our sustainability journey, one thing we’ve learned is the more pages a site has the greater the bloat, meaning it’s more intensive to store and serve that data to web users. 

And do you know what? Our website is full of bloat. So, over the past month, we’ve been looking to condense, compress and eradicate pages wherever possible, with the goal of serving our content faster while making our site simpler for people to use.

As part of that, we audited the entire site, breaking the task into sections – insight pieces, news, case studies, etc. From there, we reviewed the data to ascertain which pages were worth keeping based on page traffic, relevancy, and whether the content was tied to our current strategic goals. 

As a result we had around 200 blog and news content alone. We were able to consolidate nearly half of the content. 63 pages were removed and 17 were redirected.