What makes a website sustainable - beyond green hosting?
Sustainable web design is often discussed in terms of carbon, hosting and page weight. Those things matter, yes, but I would argue, a sustainable website is simply ‘a website that uses less.’
Sustainability is also about how much effort we ask of users, how much work we create for editors, and whether organisations can maintain what they build.
What do I mean? I mean, having less content that nobody reads, less data for people and machines to process, less functionality doing the same thing, more succinct user journeys, less maintenance for content managers, and less constant redevelopment.
I’ve put together a set of useful practical questions teams can use to review their website to assess its sustainability beyond green hosting.
Don’t build what you don’t need
Seems obvious, but every new page, feature, tool, campaign site or piece of functionality creates something else to design, build, test, host, maintain and eventually replace.
So before creating something new, ask:
What user need are we solving?
Do we already have something that meets that need?
Could we test the idea before building it properly?
Does this really need to be a new page, tool or service?
What are we committing ourselves to maintaining afterwards?
This is where sustainability and good digital practice are very closely connected.
Starting with user need helps you avoid building things just because somebody has asked for them.
And testing ideas early can save a lot of wasted effort later.
2. Measure effort as well as traffic
A classic measurement of success is engagement, clicks, time on page, but if someone finds the answer they need in 30 seconds and leaves, that might be the better result.
Likewise, somebody visiting six pages before finding the right information might look highly engaged in your analytics. In reality, you may have made their task unnecessarily difficult.
A good website should help somebody complete what they came to do without demanding unnecessary time or attention.
Think about the experience you are creating.
Are you making people wade through content they don’t need?
Are several messages competing for their attention on the same page?
Are you interrupting them before they have completed their task?
Are you encouraging them to keep scrolling or browsing when they already have what they need?
Could they have completed the same task in half the clicks?
Shorter, clearer journeys mean fewer pages loaded, less data transferred and fewer unnecessary interactions.
Respect your users’ time. It’s better to measure whether people can achieve what they came to do.
3. Keep the content estate under control
Every additional piece of content added creates ongoing responsibility.
Someone has to create it, approve it, store it, keep it accurate, review it and eventually decide what happens when it becomes out of date.
Yet many websites continually add rather than take away content.
Pages accumulate. PDFs stay online long after anybody remembers why they were uploaded. Media libraries are filled with duplicate images. Campaign material remains years after the campaign has finished.
The Web Sustainability Guidelines use the term “dark data” for information that continues to be stored even though it is no longer being used.
It’s obvious that storage has an environmental cost, but don’t forget the practical cost of managing it.
Ask yourself:
Do we know why this content exists?
Who is responsible for keeping it accurate?
Are we maintaining the same information in several places?
Do we have PDFs and downloads that nobody routinely reviews?
What happens when a programme, service or campaign finishes?
Do editors know when they are allowed to archive or remove something?
Are we creating content because users need it or because someone inside the organisation has asked for a page?
This is where sustainability becomes a governance issue.
I highly recommend setting a set of shared processes on what gets published, who owns it, how long it is likely to remain useful and when it should be reviewed.
That doesn’t have to mean another complicated governance process. It might just be a set of content principles, clearer ownership and regular conversations between the people responsible for the site.
Sometimes the sustainable answer to a request for another page is: we already have somewhere that meets that need.
4. Build less duplicated functionality
Content is not the only thing websites accumulate.
A new campaign needs a form. Another team wants a slightly different page layout. Someone asks for a new tool. A project wants its own microsite. A third-party service gets added because it solves an immediate problem.
At the time, those decisions all seem perfectly reasonable, but over time, you could end up maintaining lots of solutions all addressing the same problem.
That creates technical complexity, but it also creates organisational work. More systems need managing, more suppliers need dealing with, more editors need training and more things can break.
A clear digital strategy helps here.
Before building something new, ask:
What user need are we trying to meet?
Can an existing component, pattern or system do the job?
Have we solved this problem somewhere else already?
Are we creating something because the need is genuinely different, or because different teams are working independently?
Who will own and maintain this once the project that created it has finished?
Defined content guidelines make those conversations much easier. They give teams something to work from and give website managers a reason to say, “This is how we do this”, rather than reinventing the solution every time somebody makes a request. And developing them requires talking across teams. Looking at the bigger picture and the impact for the whole organisation.
5. Make what remains lighter
Once you have worked out what genuinely needs to exist, make it as efficient as you possibly can.
This is the more familiar side of sustainable web design.
Think about:
Optimising images rather than uploading enormous originals
Using video carefully and avoiding autoplay
Avoid adding unnecessary PDFs and downloads
Making sure downloads that do exist are kept current and removed when they are no longer needed
Reducing unnecessary JavaScript, plugins and third-party services
Using caching and compression
Choosing hosting providers that are taking meaningful steps to reduce the environmental impact of their infrastructure
If you’re unsure, you can ask your developers, agencies and hosting providers questions like: What is making the site heavy? What third-party services are being loaded? What can be removed? Are we processing or storing things we no longer need? Where is the site hosted, and what is the provider doing about energy use?
The aim is to avoid carrying unnecessary digital load on the servers.
6. Design for change, not redesign
Perhaps one of the biggest sustainability gains is avoiding the need to rebuild a website every few years.
Redesigns are expensive. They take months of staff time, create huge amounts of content work and often involve replacing technology, templates and functionality that still worked perfectly well.
If you design the site around your users, you have a chance to be more resilient. Your users’ needs are often much more stable than your organisational structure.
Someone may still need to find support, make a donation, apply, volunteer or understand your research even if responsibility for providing that service moves from one internal team to another.
A clear website strategy helps here too.
If you understand:
who the priority users are
what they need to achieve
what the organisation needs the website to achieve
the purpose of different sections and content
the patterns you use to meet recurring needs
Then the site is much easier to evolve.
You can change what needs changing without pulling everything apart.
That is what futureproofing should mean. Not trying to predict every change that might happen, but creating a website that can absorb change without breaking.
A sustainable website should be one you can keep improving, not something you have to keep replacing.
A website you can keep improving
In summary, a sustainable website is one where you understand why content exists, who it is there for and what it needs to achieve. It avoids unnecessary complexity, asks as little as possible from users and editors, and can adapt as the organisation changes.
If you are reviewing your own site, ask:
Are we building and maintaining things people genuinely need?
Can our priority users get what they came for quickly?
Do we know who owns our content and when it should be reviewed?
Are we solving the same problems in several different ways?
Could the site adapt to a restructure or change of strategy without needing another major rebuild?
If we were designing it today, with the people, time and budget we actually have, would we build it this way?
If you’d like an objective, professional outside perspective
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