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 8: We’ll show you how it’s done. It’s all about sharing what we’ve learned, and raising awareness of the issues surrounding carbon emissions and the Internet. As part of that, we’ve built a carbon emissions tool for brands to use, giving them the opportunity to see how dirty their website is.

Sharing what we’ve learned 

Ongoing Jessica Powell – Marketing Manager

Given our brand purpose is Digital For Good, what sort of agency would we be if we only helped ourselves?

We want to make sure every company/agency has the chance to do their part for the environment, and if that means documenting every single thing we do (and equally, what we decide against doing), that’s fine by us.

And so, we’ve been sharing Green For Good progress updates via these diary entries. 

Every business is different, and we’ve realised it’s about what works for you. You can find links to our diary content on our pledge page here – just click through to the pillar you’d like to get working on.

Carbon tool 

3/10/2022 – Ed Nicholson – Brand Experience Director

How can we inspire others to join us on our Green For Good journey? Well, only if they know the carbon impact of their website. 

With that in mind, we built a carbon tool, to help others understand the emissions score of their website and guide them towards a greener site. Our handy carbon impact calculator:

• Was built on the back of The Green Web Foundation’s CO2 library
• Uses Google’s Pagespeed API to calculate the size of all requests a page makes
• Shows the CO2 impact of a web page, along with pagespeed scores and whether the site uses a green web host

Design

The challenge we faced was balancing accurate results with a usable tool. With that in mind, the design of the carbon tool needed to be simple, effective and utilitarian in style. Why? Because people are using it for one thing – to obtain their website’s CO2 score. 

On top of that, we didn’t want to overcomplicate the design, ensuring the tool limited its own carbon impact. 

And so, we avoided using intensive media (videos/images) and focused on our brand’s core colour and fonts to do the heavy lifting. All iconography was created as SVGs – again, minimising the tool’s impact on the web.

To use the nifty calculator, just load the carbon tool, plug in your website’s URL, and we’ll do the rest…