Filter the available WSG success criteria upon certain settings
Abstract
Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) covers a wide range of recommendations for making websites and products more sustainable. Following these guidelines which utilize planetary, people, and prosperity (PPP) principles throughout the decision-making processes, you can minimize your environmental impact through a mixture of user-centered design, performant web development, renewable infrastructure, sustainable business Strategy, and (with metrics) various combinations of those mentioned. It should be noted that these guidelines will not address every possible mechanism or Strategy to become sustainable, as such, these guidelines (which are notably Web orientated and focused) should be seen as a starting point in a sustainability journey (coverage does not extend for example to manufacturing or shipping of physical products). Following these guidelines will often make Web content more accessible, usable, and performant as a by-product.
To use these guidelines, it is highly recommended that you take a methodical approach. Rather than working through the entire document and broadly attempting to apply everything held within to your project or service, scroll through the table of contents to find a guideline that appeals to either your skill set or that you (based upon the impact / effort rating) feel comfortable in attempting to tackle. Sustainable change is measured in progress over perfection and by breaking down the specification into achievable goals based upon guidelines or even success criteria, you can more easily progress toward long-term targets. Guideline examples and resources may also provide implementation guidance while benefits can help justify their usage to management.
Status of This Document
This is a
preview
Do not attempt to implement this version of the specification. Do not
reference this version as authoritative in any way.
Instead, see
https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/ for the Editor's draft.
This section describes the status of this
document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C
publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found
in the
W3C standards and drafts index.
This document has been reviewed by Interest Group members and interested parties. This is a draft document which may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than a work in progress. The Interest Group's role in publishing is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment.
By publishing these guidelines, the Interest Group does not expect that the work produced in this specification will affect the work undertaken by other W3C sustainability, accessibility, or performance groups. The Interest Group will continue to track these Working, Interest, and Community Groups as appropriate. This specification closely aligns itself with the principles laid down for Web Platform Design [design-principles], Privacy [privacy-principles], the Ethical Web [ethical-web-principles], and Human Rights [HR-Spec].
To provide feedback regarding this specification, the preferred method is using GitHub. It is free to create a GitHub account to file issues. Comments received on the specification cannot result in changes to this version of the guidelines but may be addressed in errata or future versions of WSG. A list of issues filed as well as archives of previous mailing list public-sustainableweb@w3.org (archive) discussions are publicly available. There is currently no preliminary interoperability or implementation report, however one of the key tasks of this Interest Group is to examine the potential for better models for digital sustainability that can feed into tooling (and thus into large studies of implementations) that can be reported upon and fed back into guidance for the Web Sustainability Guidelines.
Publication as an Editor's Draft does not
imply endorsement by W3C and its Members.
This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other
documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other
than a work in progress.
This document was produced by a group
operating under the
W3C Patent
Policy.
W3C maintains a
public list of any patent disclosures
made in connection with the deliverables of
the group; that page also includes
instructions for disclosing a patent. An individual who has actual
knowledge of a patent that the individual believes contains
Essential Claim(s)
must disclose the information in accordance with
section 6 of the W3C Patent Policy.
The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) promote good sustainability best practices based on the latest evidence and research.
WSG apply to applications, websites, and other Internet-related products and services.
The guidelines feature Success Criteria you MUST comply with, and provide other features that can help with decision-making and implementation.
Digital sustainability is a complex topic, so the best guidance may change over time, and other considerations (such as non-digital factors) should be taken into account.
1.1 Background on WSG
In 1999, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [WCAG22] defined a set of baseline guidance for Web content developers and creators of authoring tools, with the primary goal of promoting Web accessibility through the adoption of inclusive strategies. Through a similar methodology, the Web Sustainability Guidelines promote planetary, people, and prosperity best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, stakeholders, website or application creators, tool authors, tool authors, educators, students, policymakers, purchasing agents, product owners, managers, and decision-makers, with the primary goal of reducing harm to the wider ecosystem (regarding people and the planet) through sustainable Strategy adoption.
For those unfamiliar with sustainability issues relating to the Web, consider that many variables [VARIABLES] may contribute to waste or emissions being produced online.
The way data is sent or received between client and server.
Hosting, environments, arrays, and infrastructure.
Consumer devices, components, and variability in conditions.
Software like Web browsers (rendering engines and code), operating systems, assistive tools, and applications.
Human-centered design features include legislation, accessibility, and the vast field of usability.
Development workflows, business operations, and tooling.
The user's equipment, environment, and behavior.
Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) is developed in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world. It does so intending to provide a shared Strategy for Web sustainability that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. WSG is designed to apply broadly to different existing Web technologies and to be testable with a combination of automated testing and human evaluation.
Web sustainability depends not only on sustainable websites and products but also on sustainable Web browsers and other user agents, examples include the performance of rendering and the accurate measuring of website energy use through developer tooling. Authoring tools also have an important role in Web sustainability, by ensuring performant code, reducing waste, and the results are served in the most sustainable way possible.
Significant challenges were encountered in finding existing research data to both identify and establish guidance for all the variables that affect Web sustainability, which came as no surprise with the subject being such an emerging and rapidly evolving field. Work will continue in this area in future versions of WSG.
Note
The WSG were originally developed under the guidance of the Sustainable Web Design Community Group. W3C Community Groups act as incubator hubs where ideas for new technologies and standards can be discussed without formal constraints.
Over two years with the help of over 100 subject matter experts from around the globe, the group created the first draft, and subsequently through GitHub and regular meetings continued over another year to progress the WSG and its supplements to a level of maturity in which the group and its work were ready to become a part of the W3C family (where this specification continues being developed to this day).
1.2 WSG layers of guidance
The individuals and organizations that use WSG vary widely and include Web designers and developers, policymakers, purchasing agents, teachers, and students. To meet the varying needs of this audience, several layers of guidance are provided including general guidelines, testable success criteria, impact and effort ratings, advisory potential benefits, documented examples, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ratings, evidence-based links, and category tags.
All of these layers of guidance (guidelines, success criteria, impact, effort, benefits, reporting, examples, resources, and tags) work together to provide guidance on how to make content more sustainable. Authors are encouraged to view and apply all layers that they can (relevance, time, or budget permitting), including the additional content, to best make their product or service the most sustainable it can become. It should be considered that while great care has been taken to make these guidelines as well-rounded and feature-complete as possible, there will likely be additional tasks authors can perform to improve sustainability which this specification failed to address due to (for example) new techniques becoming available.
1.2.1 Principles
At the top are six principles that provide the foundation for Web Sustainability: clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient.
These guiding principles were chosen to act as the foundation of the WSG on the basis that they opened the conversation as to what Web sustainability could and should mean for website or application creators and product owners attempting to make a change to benefit people and the planet.
While the primary focus of our guidelines is sustainability in the environmental impact sense, to avoid narrowing our definition, as with many frameworks this specification takes an PPP approach to sustainability. The benefit of this methodology is that while we do recognize the importance of energy / carbon accounting and reduction, we avoid carbon tunnel vision and seek to approach digital sustainability reductions through additional measures such as through the reduction of water waste and raw material conservation such as paper. We also are mindful of the social aspects of sustainability and the importance of people as well as the planet, thereby including important criteria, notes, and cross-links where appropriate to W3C work in accessibility, privacy, and other groups and including mentions of Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), ethical behavior, and other important disciplines.
Of course, principles on their own do not make for good testable guidelines, which is why our guidelines are as heavily evidence-weighted as possible, aligning with existing sustainability reporting frameworks and standards (such as GRI). We also have made every effort possible to map our work to comply with existing and upcoming worldwide regulatory frameworks to assist with compliance.
1.2.2 Guidelines
Under the principles are guidelines. These guidelines provide the basic goals that authors should work toward to make content more sustainable. The guidelines provide the framework and overall objectives to help authors understand the success criteria, which are testable against, to implement better digital solutions. This specification groups guidelines within four categories (User Experience Design, Web Development, Infrastructure, Product and Business) that overarches various specialisms. It should, however, be noted that while many of these guidelines are curated into categories for simplicity, often they are not limited to a single group and can be utilized within other specialisms for a sustainability benefit. They also come equipped with tags that can be utilized by third-party user-agent tools to filter the criteria on journeys, categories, preferences, or additional variables to benefit the author during the implementation process.
1.2.3 Success Criteria
For each guideline, testable success criteria are provided. WSG success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria is provided in separate documents or within third-party sources as cited evidence. Details regarding machine testability and whether human testing or intervention is required in order to meet a success criteria are indicated against each success criteria. Resources (third-party evidence-based links) are denoted to allow authors to better understand and meet the Success Criteria for compliance purposes. These Resources are also provided within a separate document and all information within is subject to change.
Note
This specification offers interactivity. You can filter and see only the Success Criteria that apply to your interests / choices by viewing the Full Document mode of the WSG and clicking the interactive "Filter the available WSG Success Criteria upon certain settings" link at the top of the content. Your choices will reveal themselves upon selecting from the categories and checkboxes.
1.2.4 Additional information
These guidelines come with both an impact and effort rating system. Unlike other W3C specifications, WSG uses a simple system of Low, Medium, or High ratings against each individual guideline to reduce the burden for individuals to identify quick wins or minimal implementations, from long-term benefits or heavy refactoring while encouraging a policy of progress over perfection.
Impact:
Low
Quick sustainability wins.
Medium
Noticeable sustainable impact.
High
Significant long-term benefit.
Effort:
Low
Minimal implementation.
Medium
Some changes are needed.
High
Heavy refactoring is required.
For each of the guidelines and success criteria in the WSG document itself, the Interest Group has also documented a wide variety of potential benefits. The benefits are informative and may potentially justify the scope for compliance with the specification.
Furthermore, for those requiring guidelines to be linked to a standardized methodology that can be used in reporting the digital sustainability conformance levels of a business, a section on GRI compliance is provided.
GRI Impact:
As with impact and effort ratings, a similar scoring methodology has been used within each rating section.
Low
This will have a minimal impact within a particular category.
Medium
This will have an impact worthy of consideration within a particular category.
High
This will have a considerable impact within a particular category.
Note
For this specification, an open source Jupyter Notebook was created. As an input, it takes a spreadsheet containing all the guidelines and (using low, medium, or high) their indicators of impact on the reduction of server resource usage, network transfer, and end-user device usage. Then it takes data from a GreenIT Report [FOOTPRINT] which estimates the environmental impact of the mentioned categories across material use, water use, energy use, and GHG emissions. It then combines these datasets and estimates the comparative impact of a given recommendation on different sections of GRI taxonomy.
Examples (where possible) are provided, comprised of either URL resources or code samples to showcase how a Success Criteria within a guideline could be addressed. Tags are also provided in order to help individuals identify the relationships that occur between our material and particular groups.
1.3 Interpretation
It should be noted that the coverage of the Layers of Guidance, with particular emphasis on the impact and effort ratings, may be left open to interpretation, due to the broad and varying nature of how variables can benefit the wider ecosystem. For example, a guideline may have a low impact on preserving water but a high impact on preserving electricity. As such, the nature of benefits is nuanced and may require more in-depth analysis if authors wish to target specific environmental concerns such as water, paper, or mineral waste.
Currently, the Web Sustainability Guidelines use a crude metric of human assessment from subject-matter experts and a stated calculation and methodology underpinning the GRI reporting. However, future versions of the specification will seek to expand upon this, emphasizing metric-based calculations and proven datasets through measurability to identify emissions (and other) related targets.
It should also be noted that a drawback of the sustainability sector is that unlike other forms of measurement in other fields (such as web performance and accessibility) where binary conversations can occur (something either "is" or "is not" happening), there is unlikely to be a situation where a product or service is never emitting or causing some sort of impact upon the environment by nature of it existing. As such, implementors need to come to terms with the fact that the aim of the Web Sustainability Guidelines should be to firstly reduce what you can, then for what you cannot (as emissions will likely always occur to some extent) compensate for these continuous emissions to ensure as minimal a footprint as possible.
Note
Coverage should not be restricted to what falls within the digital sector. While for this specification we primarily focus on Internet-related technologies (and the people and businesses that use them), sustainability variables exist beyond the scope of this work and as such, the impacts of these differing areas of concern should be addressed when meeting targets, reporting, and complying with relevant legislation.
1.4 Relationships
Note
The body of work and landscape WSG builds on is constantly evolving. Some, typically referred to as "living" or "evergreen" standards, are subject to change frequently, and their impact on this publication's validity may be immediate. Others are updated less regularly and the changes may not affect WSG publications until a new revision is issued.
In all cases, it is therefore prudent that implementors should regularly ensure that best practices have not changed due to new research or data and that any tooling they are using is frequently updated to account for compliance changes occurring as a result of more weighty evidence and guidance.
Relationship to AFNOR
Association Française de Normalisation is a Paris-based standards organization and a member body for France at the International Organization for Standardization. WSG directly references the AFNOR SPEC 2201 document where guidelines may have relatable sustainability associations.
Relationship to ARCEP
The Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques, des Postes et de la Distribution de la Presse is the regulatory authority for telecommunications in France. Explicit comparison notes from guidelines that match (for compliance purposes) pointing to the General Policy Framework for the Ecodesign of Digital Services (GPFEDS) inside each WSG relevant guideline reference section have been provided.
Relationship to AWS and Microsoft Azure WAF
Amazon and Microsoft Azure both provide a Well-Architected Framework offering a set of best practices that helps protect digital products from consuming excessive resources. Where sustainability measures match the evidence and guidelines within the WSG, cross-links have been placed within guideline resources.
Relationship to GR491
The Handbook of Sustainable Design of Digital Services (also known as GR491) is a series of sustainability best practices, published by the Institute for Sustainable IT. Alike many other best practice guides, where matching compliance targets can be found to the WSG guidelines and Success Criteria, cross-links in the resources section have been provided.
Relationship to GreenIT
The GreenIT 115 best practices of web Eco-Design project is an open source French collaboration to provide meaningful goals to reduce a digital carbon footprint. As there are many parallels between WSG and the open source GreenIT project, guideline references note prior work from this project where it exists.
Relationship to GRI
Global Reporting Initiative is an international independent standards organization that helps organizations and individuals understand and communicate their sustainability impact. As denoted in 1.2.4 Additional information, WSG provides metrics relating to GRI Standards to offer more targeted guidance for regulatory compliance goals. As our measurability improves, our results are subject to change.
Relationship to OpQuast
OpQuast is a quality assurance provider that offers checklists for things such as Web quality assurance. While many of the improvements noted fall out of the sustainability scope, several directly relate to WSG Success Criteria or may impact guidelines as a secondary effect and should be considered. As this list is comprehensive, items deemed of consequence are noted in the resources section for relevant guidelines.
Relationship to SDGs
The United Nations Member States in 2015 as a result of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development created the Sustainable Development Goals. While some of these goals are notably difficult to achieve by individual action, wherever digital / Web technology interconnects with an explicit SDG target (and WSG could help shift towards compliance), the SDG target is noted within the references for each guideline.
1.5 Conformance
As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative. The main normative content of WSG is composed of guidelines and success criteria, which define requirements that impact conformance claims. Non-normative material provides advisory information to help interpret the guidelines but does not create requirements that impact a conformance claim.
This section lists requirements for conformance to WSG. It also provides information about how to make optional conformance claims.
1.5.1 Conformance requirements
The WSG approach to conformance differs from WCAG in that in preference to having conformance levels, these guidelines are robustly built so that they can be implemented over time, in a non-specific order, and each will provide some measurable sustainability benefit. As such, conformance is measured upon the implementation of each guideline (and all of its success criteria being met) across the whole website or product.
Note
Total conformance is achieved by meeting every Success Criteria for every guideline within the specification. As a general policy, most websites or products will not likely be able to satisfy all Success Criteria. This could be as a result of time commitments for refactoring code, or because certain guidelines and Success Criteria simply do not apply to your work. In these situations, it is not recommended that authors prioritize conformance over other important website features such as security updates. Pragmatism and progress over perfection should be considered paramount when implementing and conforming to these guidelines.
1.5.2 Conformance claims
Conformance claims are not required. Authors can conform to WSG without making a claim. If a conformance claim is made, then the conformance claim must include the following information:
Conformance: A concise description of Sustainability commitments and a list of the guidelines adhered to.
Other: In addition to the required components of a conformance claim above, provide additional information to assist users such as additional steps taken (beyond the specification) to improve sustainability or statistics (metrics) that show the effect of changes that have already been made.
Note
Recording conformance claims may be helpful for utilization within a sustainability statement or a method of proving that you are meeting sustainability reduction targets (such as for internal scope accounting).
1.5.3 Greenwashing
In the field of sustainability, the potential for greenwashing (misappropriation or deliberately misinterpreting our work to appear greener than you are) is a very real threat. Within other fields of the tech industry (such as web accessibility), false claims can lead to harm to users. In sustainability, harm can occur not only to users of a product or service but also to the wider ecosystem.
As such, with claims of conformance, we advise consumers and implementors to do the following:
Do not claim the Web Sustainability Guidelines as a mark of total sustainability (as there will always be gaps in this document's coverage).
Only make claims that they can reasonably justify with evidence to back up such statements (and provide easy access to this).
If you come across an organization or individual making claims regarding the WSG that appear unlikely or untrue, request the claims be justified, rectified, or removed.
Legislation exists (or is coming into force globally) providing coverage around sustainability claims and as such, penalties for greenwashing will not only be detrimental to your users but to your business.
1.6 WSG supporting documents
The WSG document is designed to meet the needs of those who need a stable, referenceable technical specification. Other documents, called supporting documents, are based on this document and address other important purposes, including providing further techniques regarding implementation strategies, guiding authors through the guidelines that apply to their use case, and how WSG would be applied to new technologies.
1.7 Requirements for WSG
WSG meets a set of requirements for WSG which, in turn, inherit requirements from any prior versions. Requirements structure the overall framework of guidelines and ensure backward compatibility. The Interest Group also used a less formal set of acceptance criteria for success criteria which is based on evidence-supported practices grouped by their impact and implementation upon the Web ecosystem. This allows for further expansion in future versions while maintaining a strict grouping of related (and overlapping) guidelines.
1.8 Versions of guidance
WSG was initiated to improve Web Sustainability guidance. As no prior version exists, the initial draft was created through initial Community Group meetings, proposals (laid out in meeting minutes), and early draft guidelines were drawn up and refined, leading to the guidelines included in this version. This work has been continued through the formation of a W3C Interest Group to enhance and improve upon the work of the early Community Group. The Interest Group considers that WSG incrementally advances Web Sustainability in numerous areas, but underscores that not all potential environmental improvements are met by these guidelines.
If you are creating content and systems designed for users, then whether you know it or not, you are working in user experience (UX).
Good user experience reduces time and resources wasted on the journey. Poor user experience does the opposite, often also harming accessibility. Meanwhile, visual design choices and how we present information can have some of the biggest impacts on asset size, performance, and overall web sustainability.
Goals include:
Identify and regularly audit product, user, and user needs and the related impacts.
Improve ease of access with a clear information architecture.
Ensure assets are suitable and optimized for the lowest possible footprint.
Benefits include:
Good user experience amplifies the positive impact of your content.
Faster loading times reduce user drop-off. This can lead to, for example, more sign-ups and reduced cart abandonment in e-commerce.
Improved accessibility, compatibility, and usability boosts social inclusion and cohesion.
Sustainable user experience design best practices will often also improve performance and SEO.
Plain language summary of User Experience Design
Identify and address issues affecting your service, audience, users, users, non-users, and other affected parties.
Cultivate a lightweight experience based around well-written content, thoughtfully designed and optimized assets, and appropriate alternatives.
Guide users quickly to their objectives with an effective navigation system and layout using recognized patterns.
Create, apply, document, and share efficient design systems to reduce duplication.
Enable accessible interaction, using forms only when necessary.
Integrate regular audits and tests into your project release calendar.
2.1 Display any factors that have a negative impact on your project
Identify, track, and publicly disclose negative external factors.
Identify existing or potential negative external factors affecting a project. Disclose these in a publicly available resource, identifying areas where digital sustainability can be improved. Perform this audit at the start of your project and at regular intervals.
Additional information
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Accessibility: Understanding the audience can identify potential improvements that go beyond basic inclusive design practices.
Environment: Constructing a plan to reduce emissions enables improvement over time.
Privacy: Having an overview of components makes it easier to identify potential data protection risks.
Social Equity: Auditing factors can reveal factors not commonly understood or covered in established best practices, enabling better support for underrepresented groups.
Identify primary and secondary target users. Evaluate and define their needs through quantitative and/or qualitative research, testing, or analytics. Ensure your users and affected communities are consistently and closely involved in the research and testing process.
Account for potential user constraints, such as the device age, operating system choice or version, browser, Virtual Private Network VPN use, and connection speeds when designing and assessing the quality of user experiences.
Conduct internal and user research to identify whether a technical, material, or human constraint might require adaptations to reduce barriers or improve access to content.
Assign all involved parties, including users, an equitable role in the decision-making process when undertaking research, identifying needs, or iterative design work.
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Accessibility: Understanding the needs of your audience through accessibility and trauma-informed research will help you prioritize design improvements to boost accessibility beyond the basics.
Conversion: Meeting audience requirements increases the likelihood that they will use it regularly and recommend it to others, improving its adoption rate and reputation.
Economic: Responding to the needs of your audience means they are more likely to convert and purchase.
Environment: Undertaking research to identify real user needs and behaviour means developers can avoid wasting time, effort, and emissions on building unnecessary features.
Performance: Use user research to identify UX bottlenecks that cause user abandonment. Fixes can be measured, tested, and evaluated to further improve performance and reduce emissions through removing those bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
Privacy: Assessing user needs and being minimal with further information requests will help you comply with privacy legislation.
Social Equity: Improving UX with compatibility in mind means products or services work better for users who might otherwise face various barriers to accessing content - such as older devices, low-bandwidth environments, or restrictive territories, language. This reduces e-waste and improves equity if older equipment meets needs for longer.
Establish a plan of action for non-users and other affected parties who might be indirectly impacted by choices made in e-commerce, this can include neighbors accepting parcels or traffic jams due to deliveries. Other examples include the local health impacts of infrastructure emissions, or supply chain pressure. Research non-user needs, understand how they might be affected, and consider ways negative effects could be mitigated.
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Accessibility: Including people who are not primary or secondary users, such as people with disabilities, in research means their specific needs can be addressed more effectively.
Economic: Researching the entire ecosystem, including the broader or indirect impact and services, helps organizations to manage budgets more effectively.
Environment: Making certain interventions, such as coordinating planning with suppliers, can significantly reduce the environmental impact of a digital product or service.
Social Equity: Including marginalized or excluded groups in the research process makes it easier to avoid unintended consequences or requirements relating to these groups ahead of time.
Optimize all branding materials and assets approved during the ideation process in line with sustainability best practices prior to deployment. This also applies to brand refreshes, rebranding, and later enhancements. Make publicly available branding guidelines detailing the sustainability impact and best-practice deployment of materials and assets.
Use wireframes and rapid prototyping to quickly build consensus, reduce risk, and reduce the number of resources needed to build features. Evaluate the impact of all tools used.
Use the participatory design approach to involve users within the iteration and design process. When conducting user testing, reach out to your community to help improve your product. Provide opportunities for users to apply their knowledge and experience to your product or service.
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Conversion: Testing user interfaces usually leads to improved conversion rates as they can be optimized accordingly. This includes removing anything that causes friction and designing content in a way that optimizes user flow, reducing emissions while maximizing conversion.
Economic: Incorporating wireframes, prototypes, and user testing into early product design cycles reduces money and effort otherwise wasted building features people will not use.
Consider planetary needs and environmental boundaries during the ideation phase. This can include creating non-user, non-human (animal, planet) personas, or climate-specific user stories and sprints.
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Accessibility: Understanding real-world accessibility requirements in the early development stages makes it possible to prioritize inclusive design throughout the entire lifecycle. This improves efficiency, as developers will not be prompted to add in accessibility later. It will also reduce emissions associated with the patching process.
Environment: Helping key contributors to better understand the environmental impact makes it possible to track and reduce that impact throughout the lifecycle of a project.
Social Equity: Accounting for the needs of users who might otherwise face various barriers to accessing content - on such as older devices, in low-bandwidth environments, or have other barriers to accessing information early in the process will reduce the need for costly redesigns or adding appropriate alternatives at a later date.
Make access as simple and efficient as possible. Displaying the time required to complete an action, reduction of choice, and ensuring users understand requirements at the start of a journey can improve user efficiency.
Accessibility: Providing intuitive, lightweight user experiences improves understanding and accessibility, especially for people with cognitive disabilities. Reducing confusion, this can reduce the time spent trying to find content.
Conversion: Following conventions and patterns with a clean, distraction-free layout reduces churn, page abandonment, and barriers to entry.
Economic: Simplifying interfaces by reducing the amount of information can reduce the burden of choice and help to convert users during online decision-to-purchase processes. Reduced user choice will also reduce data payloads.
Environment: Streamlining user experience to remove barriers and the non-essential reduces unnecessary code and content payloads and the amount of time users spend on their devices trying to complete tasks or find information. This reduces the amount of energy used and lowers emissions.
Performance: Minimizing the amount of content on screen to what is genuinely required reduces bandwidth consumption over the lifecycle project and may make the user experience feel faster.
Privacy: Hiding non-essential features can improve data protection by reducing overall data collection overall, especially that associated with the integration of third-party services.
Social Equity: Reducing device and bandwidth requirements through providing more lightweight experiences can improve work better for users using older devices or located in low-bandwidth environments, and similar.
Use decorative design only when it enhances user experience. Remove unnecessary assets or those that do not enhance user experience or sustainability. Alternatively, make these optional and disabled by default.
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You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High
Tags
Assets, Performance, UI, Usability
2.8 Ensure that navigation and wayfinding are well-structured
Provide good information architecture that signposts visitors to what they need, both human and machine, so they can reach their destination as efficiently as possible.
Consider implementing an efficient and regularly updated sitemap for human users. While guidance beyond the navigation bar may be unnecessary for smaller projects, clearly structured human-readable sitemaps can improve accessibility and help users find their way through websites or other online content with naturally complex or legacy information architecture.
Accessibility: Enabling easier navigation makes content accessible to people with disabilities. Bringing people to their goal faster also reduces data consumption.
Conversion: Optimizing structure can also boost conversion rates as people are more likely to find what they need. The same applies when users are made aware of new content related to their interests.
Economic: Shortening user journeys can also reduce hosting costs where this is linked to data transfer.
Environment: Improving navigation and search efficiency can reduce the time users spend finding what they need and achieving their objectives. This also lowers emissions.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Tags
Accessibility, HTML, Marketing, UI, Usability
2.9 Design to assist and not to distract
Provide engagement that keeps the visitor's focus where it needs to be, avoiding anything that will either reduce efficiency or artificially prolong engagement.
Accessibility: Reducing unnecessary barriers can improve accessibility and navigation using assistive technologies.
Environment: Using pagination rather than infinite scrolling allows individuals to request data on demand rather than encouraging overconsumption. This reduces carbon impact while encouraging healthy and sustainable browsing habits.
Performance: Avoiding attention traps improves user experience by reducing the time spent clicking through, closing, or hiding these distractions. Presenting the information in less distracting ways makes the experience feel faster, reduces barriers to access, and improves user flow.
Social Equity: Preserving user focus on their objectives reduces the potential for confusion, mistakes, and lapses in judgment.
Transparency: Avoiding deceptive patterns will boost trust and encourage users to return or recommend.
Accessibility: Using established design patterns makes it easier for all users to understand how to perform a task, especially those with greater accessibility needs.
Environment: Building using recognized design components will reduce the amount of time users spend trying to perform a task. The less time users spend achieving their goals, the lower their energy usage and emissions.
Performance: Using familiar design patterns that appear where users expect and only when appropriate can increase perceived performance due to more effective navigation.
Avoid deceptive design or unethical coding techniques that manipulate users into taking actions that are not in their best interest. Examples include anti-right click, copy prevention, requiring an account to purchase, etc.
Select, present, and label advertisements and sponsorships transparently and only implement where these provide economic and ethical value without diminishing user experience.
Focus on serving user intent through non-manipulative search and social media optimization. For example, do not misuse coding practices intended to support assistive technologies. This can include content with natural redundancy, or unhelpful or low-quality material designed only to manipulate search results.
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Accessibility: Avoiding deceptive design patterns improves user experience for people using assistive technologies, as these can be especially disruptive when using a screen reader. This improves their trust and access to your content.
Conversion: Avoiding deceptive patterns can result in fewer complaints, reduce barriers, and improve conversion.
Environment: Avoiding deceptive design patterns reduces energy consumption because users do not waste time and energy trying to undo choices they never intended to make.
Performance: Using ethical, non-disruptive practices will accelerate the user journey and perceived speed and reduce unnecessary friction.
Privacy: Ensuring compliance with ethical privacy practices and avoiding dark and deceptive patterns reduces litigation risk. It also reduces data transmission between tracking and advertising services providers.
2.12 Make deliverables understandable and reusable
Create well documented deliverables so that future users can find and make use of them without requiring assistance or expending unnecessary time and resources.
Conversion: Using open and reusable formats lowers barriers to entry, as there will likely be no cost involved in participation. It can encourage users to play a more active role in the project.
Economic: Creating and maintaining good documentation will make implementation easier and reduce future ongoing costs associated with maintenance.
Environment: Using common and clear formats for deliverables will reduce the time users need to spend familiarizing themselves with and adapting to the environment. This reduces the energy spent managing a project and the associated emissions.
Accessibility: Using a design system with accessible components will improve access to information for people with disabilities. Building design features that integrate accessibility from the start ensures everyone is always included.
Conversion: Using design systems supports consistent user interfaces. This improves user trust because individuals will recognize familiar components and know how to use them. This can improve conversion rates as it will reduce frustration, abandonment, and possible complaints.
Economic: Using standardized components and avoiding redundancy can reduce development time and the associated costs. Familiarity makes the experience easier for users, reducing bounce rates.
Environment: Following web standards to build consistent interfaces requires less energy and resources, because they are naturally more optimized. Design systems that incorporate environmental criteria can help to scale digital sustainability and reduce redundancy, reduced energy use and negative impact.
Performance: Building design systems using standardized components reduces the need for repeat coding. This reduces developer coding time and can improve performance. Overall, sustainable patterns reduce emissions.
Write content using plain and inclusive language, at an appropriate reading level for your audience. Account for specific needs in relation to accessibility, native language, and internationalization.
Use appropriate formatting for digital media. Provide a clear document structure with consideration of visual hierarchy. Use headings, bulleted lists, line spacing, and highlights appropriately. Provide information with appropriate formatting for the action users need to take.
Accessibility: Using plain-language makes content easier to understand and accessible to more users. Good structure that complies with standards and expectations works better alongside assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
Conversion: Writing and presenting authoritative content with intent and care can lead to citation by third parties. This can increase traffic with pre-warmed leads.
Economic: Being recognized as an authoritative source can bring additional recognition, users, and opportunities.
Environment: Ensuring content is easy to find and comprehend enables users to make informed decisions faster, taking less time and resources. This reduces energy consumption and emissions.
Performance: Creating well-structured content can improve search performance. When content ranks higher in search engines, people are more likely to land in the right place straight away.
Social Equity: Using inclusive language that avoids jargon and unnecessary exclusion can improve user experience for a broader audience.
Economic: Optimizing resources means users with data caps can preserve their resources. Providers can enjoy reduced hosting costs due to less data being transferred.
Environment: Compressing and delivering images in lightweight formats can reduce the hardware burden on older devices. This can reduce overall consumer e-waste by slowing or eliminating forced upgrade cycles.
Performance: Optimizing images can accelerate performance by reducing HTTP requests, data transfer, and the physical rendering effort. All of these have an impact on user experience and performance.
Social Equity: Providing lightweight images makes it easier for users in low-bandwidth areas or those using older devices to access your content, provided these devices can support the formats used.
Let the user control media, including a choice of resolutions and formats and the option to deactivate media. Inform users the length, format, and data intensity of the media.
Establish media management and use policy to evaluate and reduce the overall impact of media, such as audio, video, or emerging media formats. Include criteria for media compression and file formats.
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Economic: Eliminating data-intensive media entirely and using alternatives such as transcripts reduce costs associated with hosting and data transfer.
Environment: Reducing the battery drain associated with loading data-intensive content by preventing auto-loading or delaying it until the moment it is required reduces energy emissions associated with data transfer and renering.
Performance: Tailoring user experience to the device, situation, and environment of the user by having different resolutions and quality formats available reduces wasted bandwidth. This can boost performance for users who make choices to reduce the data downloaded.
Social Equity: Providing alternatives to data-intensive media allows with limited bandwidth or older devices to access content.
Progressively display an appropriate number of animations to avoid overburdening the user or negatively impacting device performance. This includes setting a maximum number of replays or iterations.
Environment: Disabling and reducing animation to the essential, with appropriate optimization and user control, reduces rendering impact and associated emissions.
Social Equity: Catering to different perspectives on and preferences in relation to animation can improve acceptance and access for individuals using different devices and from different backgrounds.
Limit the number of fonts used. Design or subset fonts to omit unnecessary or unused variations, such as font weight or characters. Use the most performant file format available.
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Include WebVTT closed captions and subtitles support for videos. Provide localization as expected by your audience, including subtitles and sign language that meet the same standard.
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Accessibility: Providing content in multiple formats means users can choose the format that best supports their needs, helping to eliminate barriers.
Conversion: Creating text alternatives to media, such as transcripts, means your content can be more easily found and indexed by search engines.
Economic: Hosting and delivering text is less computationally expensive than media, so providing text-based content can reduce hosting and bandwidth costs.
Environment: Offering low-impact alternatives to media formats reduces rendering and processing effort, and the associated emissions.
Performance: Reducing interactivity can help users access what they need faster.
Social Equity: Providing text alternatives for those who are not able to watch a video or listen to audio, even situationally, improves access and user experience.
Remove unnecessary forms and reduce form content to the minimum necessary to meet the user needs while satisfying the organization's minimum requirements. Clearly communicate why a form is necessary, the value it provides, the number of steps required for completion, and what will be done with the collected data. Also disclose if the data will be shared with third parties.
Avoid using auto-completion or auto-suggest based on partial entry to conserve user bandwidth and reduce unnecessary server side requests. Support the use of helpful tooling, such as password managers, by not preventing autofill.
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Accessibility: Labeling your forms correctly and testing for accessibility and compatibility with a range of different devices and inputs reduces barriers. Autocomplete improves ease of use and efficiency for all use, especially those with additional accessibility needs. Well-labeled and accessible forms are more likely to be successfully completed.
Conversion: Building forms based on standards with ease of use and accessibility in mind boosts conversion, as more users are able to complete them.
Economic: Implementing more accessible and usable forms reduces frustration while increasing completion rates. This can reduce complaints, support costs, and abandonment.
Environment: Optimizing forms reduces the resources required to complete them, which reduces emissions.
Privacy: Collecting informed consent and providing helpful disclosures about cookies, data collection, and data processing within forms, alongside appropriate links to find further information in an accessible format, improves data privacy.
Support non-visual browsing methods and various non-graphical ways to interact with content. This includes anything from assistive technologies to voice agents. Consider and provide working alternatives to visual interfaces.
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Accessibility: Supporting non-visual browsing methods means people can access your content more easily when using specialized accessibility aids.
Conversion: Increasing compatibility by supporting a wider range of devices, beyond the most popular or well-known hardware and software, will enable interactions with new audiences and increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.
Environment: Allowing non-visual browsers to interact with your content can help to reduce overall emissions. Non-visual browsers may lack a display, which reduces the environmental impact of browsing.
Remove non-essential notifications. Justify and reduce email, text message (SMS), and other invasive or energy-intense notifications to what is strictly necessary. Useful notifications, such as alerts for new content should be used with care and restraint, having both the users understanding and informed consent.
Let the user adjust their own notification and messaging settings. Ensure the options to unsubscribe, log out, and close an account should be available and visible. Ensure it is possible for the user to change their contact details.
Clearly explain the result of a potential input through helpful prompts and messages that explain errors, next steps, and other relevant information. This will help to manage user's expectations.
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Accessibility: Signposting individuals to information through helpful notifications or error messages will reduce abandonment. All information must be presented in a way that does not discriminate, as this could exclude many potential users.
Environment: Notifying users about important events can reduce the need to constantly refresh pages. These notifications provide a shortcut, ensuring content is loaded when it becomes available. This can save emissions.
Privacy: Using notifications appropriately ensures personalized content is only displayed on specific devices, reducing the risk of information exposure.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Example
<form>
<label for="choose">Would you prefer a banana or cherry? (required)</label>
<input id="choose" name="i-like" required />
<button>Submit</button>
</form>
Tags
JavaScript, Privacy, UI, Usability
2.23 Reduce the impact of downloadable and physical documents
Reduce the need for physical documents as much as possible by allowing the saving of well-labeled, optimized digital downloads and having a print style sheet.
Design your process to reduce the need for paper documents. Where the production of paper documents is essential, it should be designed to have the lowest impact possible. Include a CSS print style sheet and test it with different types of content. Encourage saving documents in digital formats over paper-based storage and archiving.
Display the document name, a summary, the file size, and the format prior to downloading. Allow users to choose the right format and language for their needs where possible. Avoid embedding documents directly; provide a link to download or view them within the browser instead.
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Accessibility: Providing a range of inclusively designed downloadable documents in a variety of formats benefits those with accessibility needs as they can choose the ideal format for their device and use case.
Environment: Reducing the need to print documents or providing a print friendly style sheet reduces emissions associated with paper, ink, and the act of printing.
Performance: Compressing or otherwise optimizing documents means they can be downloaded faster, avoiding users needing to wait to view documents prepared for offline viewing.
2.24 Get users and contributors invested in the project
Document how you test new features with real users and validate the results, ensuring resources and training are provided to maintain the project's viability.
Outline processes used to prototype and test new features, product ideas, and user interface components. Test with real users who represent different perspectives and user constraints.
Conversion: Using a well-built, thoroughly tested interface is likely to reduce user frustration and churn.
Economic: Prioritizing user research in organizational policies helps to reduce and mitigate risks and costs associated with building unnecessary features, which would also incur technical debt. Performing iterative testing and prototyping reduces the resources needed to build new features.
Environment: Enabling users to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently reduces energy use and emissions.
Check the codebase for bugs, identify performance issues, and account for accessibility or security problems at appropriate regular intervals, such as every month or quarter.
Accessibility: Maintaining inclusivity over time through regular audits and testing reduces outages, improves access to information, and creates a better experience for all users, not just those with accessibility needs.
Economic: Performing ongoing regression testing improves security, which reduces risk and its associated costs.
Environment: Carrying out regular service audits reduces technical debt, which improves performance and environmental sustainability. Regression analysis also supports continuous improvement and lowers resource use over time, which in turn reduces emissions.
Security: Auditing a product or service regularly will identify potential sources of breaches and areas of improvement in security and privacy.
Identify and resolve bottlenecks or issues in the underlying code or infrastructure which could impact sustainability and performance. Consider both simulated and real-world metrics. Monitor performance across every release cycle using appropriate tooling or through research and auditing.
Collect only data required to provide a streamlined and effective user journey and comply with relevant accessibility and data protection legislation. Put policies in place to ensure strict adherence.
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Conversion: Increasing page load speed can measurably improve conversion rates, as users will be less likely to abandon a product or service if the content appears instantaneously.
Economic: Storing and transferring less data reduces costs for content hosts and website and application owners.
Environment: Improving performance of a website or application increases device longevity, as users will be less compelled to upgrade their devices.
Performance: Loading less data improves performance. Lighter pages are rendered and available to users quicker, helping to improve the UX.
Conversion: Acting on feedback often improves conversion rates because it ensures that your digital product or service reflects the needs of your audience.
Economic: Avoiding wasted development time building features that bring little value to the consumer means resources can be focused where they deliver more value.
Environment: Learning from feedback enables choices that improve environmental impact. An example of this would be making sure that the most frequently used features are placed higher in the visual hierarchy. This reduces the effort and time users must invest to achieve their goals.
Performance: Performing user testing allows you to retain focus on goal and maintain good performance without unnecessary complexity.
Accessibility: Gathering feedback from people with disabilities can guide key improvements. This ensures your project can be used by the widest possible audience.
Environment: Ensuring users can quickly and easily accomplish tasks or access information reduces the energy used searching for answers.
Establish and maintain a compatibility policy which covers current and obsolete devices and software versions, listing the supported device brands, operating systems, and browsers (including versions). Update this regularly in line with new releases.
Avoid planned obsolescence. Strive to maintain compatibility for as long as possible and communicate clearly whether an update is evolutionary, as in large updates that can significantly reduce performance, or corrective, as in smaller updates that fix bugs or improve security.
Test performance in various scenarios to ensure compatibility. Testing should cover weak, unstable, restricted, or slow connections, old browsers, and devices older than five years.
Accessibility: Incorporating accessibility into early prototypes ensures it remains a priority throughout the lifecycle. Broken code can also impact assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and how they describe content to individuals with visual disabilities. Semantic code can help to deliver an equal, error-free experience to all.
Conversion: Delivering products and services that last longer and enjoy longer-lasting compatibility can increase conversion rates, due to the lower abandonment rates and a broader audience that is able to use a barrier-free version of the product or service.
Economic: Saving time and improving quality results in cost reductions, because increased stability reduces the need for refactoring. Users benefit from greater trust and potentially lower costs and maintenance fees as upgrades may not be required as frequently.
Environment: Avoiding incompatibility issues can significantly reduce e-waste, with planned obsolescence being is one of the biggest contributors to e-waste worldwide.Extending lifespans and improving compatibility within your service plan can improve sustainability and slow the upgrade cycle otherwise driven by sluggish digital experiences.
Performance: Deploying incompatible code has an energy cost. When code is non-standard, deprecated or does not work on a device, it can take additional time to render because it is usually not optimized for the environment. This puts pressure on the CPU and wastes battery. Using modern web standards will help your service run reliably in modern browsers.
Social Equity: Enhancing compatibility and longevity helps to reduce the digital divide. This can be significant in relation to income inequality, infrastructure robustness, or accessibility, for example. Broader support can therefore open your work to new markets, or extend the viability of existing access. Similarly, because progressive web applications use established web standards, they are available to more people than more cost-prohibitive closed systems.
Sustainable web design and development practices at the front-end and back-end often intersect with best practices, unlocking numerous benefits for people and the planet alike.
Front-end and back-end web development play a big role in creating a sustainable web. The result is code that runs more efficiently and transparently. Products are better able to meet user and user objectives, fast, while reducing the burden on hardware resources. Sustainable web development offers scaling and wide-reaching advantages.
Goals include:
Optimize code for sustainability impact targets.
Maximize product and service efficiency to reduce hardware load and requirements.
Add and adapt technical features to increase digital sustainability.
Benefits include:
Sustainable coding practices promote faster, more efficient code that is easier to scale and maintain.
Similarly, reducing client device entry requirements may allow you to expand your services to include those using less advanced client devices.
Lower abandonment rates thanks to optimized code on both the client and server-side means fewer errors, less downtime, and better user experience.
More efficient web services inevitably translate to better performance and technical SEO, boosting search engine visibility.
Plain language summary of Web Development
Optimize your project by eliminating unnecessary or duplicate code.
Develop your project to sustainably meet the needs of your audience.
Assess the necessity and quality of third-party services, dependencies, and first-party code.
Eliminate incorrect code, blocking events, form errors, security issues, and outdated code.
Design interfaces to be responsive, and adaptable to different devices and user preferences.
Include useful files expected by browsers, search engines, and other services.
Use the latest version of tools and software and use native features where able.
3.1 Set goals based on performance and energy impact
Account for the difference in energy intensity that different types of content may have on a project and set goals based on what you would like to achieve.
Set clear goals with performance and environmental impact in mind, then meet them. These could include, the number of requests or elements that must be rendered.
Consider differences in the energy intensity or testable impact across each component. For example, unstyled text is less computationally intensive to render than CSS, which in turn is less process-heavy than JavaScript, which is less resource-heavy than WebGL or 4K video.
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Conversion: Page speed and web performance are confirmed ranking factors when it comes to SEO. A faster digital product or service may support an organization's efforts to rank higher on search engines. Combined with the better on-page user experience, this can lead to improved conversion rates.
Environment: Limiting the number of server requests and the DOM size lessens the negative environmental impact of a product or service' by reducing CPU and GPU cycles and RAM usage. This brings down energy consumption, and reduces the need to recharge portable devices as frequently.
Performance: Reducing the hardware load improves overall performance. Devices are less likely to be overloaded or hit their limits with reduced resources.
Remove unnecessary white space, comments, and other non-essential characters from code and data files to reduce file sizes and improve loading times. This applies to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG, and other relevant file types.
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Conversion: Faster page speeds improve user experience across the board. This makes users less likely to abandon their journey or search for their information elsewhere.
Performance: Less data transferred means reduced loading times. White space itself is ignored by rendering engines, meaning the client-side impact is minimal. However, reducing data transfer has a positive impact.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Example
!function(e,t){"use strict";"object"==typeof module&&"object"==typeof module.exports?module.exports=e.document?t(e,!0):function(e){if(!e.document)throw new Error("jQuery requires a window with a document");return t(e)}:t(e)}("undefined"!=typeof window?window:this,function(g,e){"use strict";var t=[],r=Object.getPrototypeOf,s=t.slice,v=t.flat?function(e){return t.flat.call(e)}:function(e){return t.concat.apply([],e)},u=t.push,i=t.indexOf
Tags
CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Performance
3.3 Modularize bandwidth-heavy components
Break down large components into smaller, self-contained pieces that can be requested only when required to save bandwidth.
Break down bandwidth-heavy components into smaller, modular segments that can be loaded only when required. This applies to both front-end and back-end code.
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Conversion: Modularizing code can accelerate performance, improving user experience while reducing the chance of abandonment. This is especially impact for users of low-resource devices, such as handhelds.
Economic: Reducing the size of large files will reduce bandwidth expenses for service providers.
Performance: Using smaller, modular components allows for more effective caching of commonly those reused components, while loading functions only when required reduces the payload. Unused portions of a larger resource will not be downloaded, which can have a considerable impact.
Remove duplication and/or simplify and optimize your code for better performance, focusing on essential features so you have a cleaner, less redundant product and codebase.
Improve existing solutions rather than redeveloping and redesigning products from scratch, since the latter would duplicate the coding effort and maintenance burden for developers rather than reduce the learning burden for users.
Use organization methodology and systems such as Don't Repeat Yourself (DRY) or Write Everything Twice (WET) to optimize the arrangement and output of your JavaScript and CSS.
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Accessibility: Following naming conventions used in methodologies can be easier for developers with accessibility needs to follow and use compared to generic selector identifiers.
Economic: Using an optimized and reusable codebase can enhance productivity and code quality leading to a better return on investment.
Environment: Integrating certain methodologies can add code to your markup, but they also improve maintainability. This reduces development time at scale, and could reduce energy consumption as developers optimized workflows will reduce the time and energy spent on tasks.
Performance: Avoiding repetitive code reduces waste in markup, which reduces the time it takes to download site data. This also reduces server-side impact.
3.6 Give third parties the same priority as first parties during assessment
Avoid using large third-party libraries and frameworks where possible, and where these must be used, self host, defer loading, allow the user to object, and provide alternatives.
Assess third-party content and/or services (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, tracking scripts, and more) as early as possible in the ideation or creation process. Use as few as possible, preferring lighter, less complex solutions to reduce the overall environmental impact, including Scope 3 emissions.
Use click-to-load triggers based on an import on interaction pattern to prevent automatic loading of third-party content and/or services (see above). Offer suitable alternatives to third-party use, for example, a link to a contact form as an alternative to a chat widget.
Host icons and widgets on your own server, rather than relying on third-party services to host and deliver these or embed third-party functionality within your project.
Respect user preferences around the use of third-party products and services, similar to the implementation of cookie consent modals. Provide mechanisms to disable or refuse non-first-party features alongside explanations of their purpose unless it is possible to show these third-party features are critical for functionality.
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Environment: Replacing heavy tooling and third-party services with lightweight tooling reduces user bandwidth usage and compute impact. It does require learning a new way of doing things or reducing the visibility of impactful features until they are requested. It can significantly reduce a page's overall 'environmental impact, including the data you have no control over. This is especially relevant when calculating Scope 3 emissions.
Performance: Self-hosting fully self-contained services, features, and content are more performant by design. They avoid additional server and rendering requests or other complications associated with third-party content. You can choose to only include the required features, further reducing overall bandwidth usage and associated emissions.
Privacy: Choosing not to embed and automatically load third-party content may be perceived as a privacy benefit by privacy-conscious users, because this reduces opportunities for their user data to be exploited.
Remove optional HTML elements, attribute quotes, and default attributes only when they do not negatively impact functionality, accessibility, or readability. Retain them when they enhance accessibility, maintain clarity without compromising on performance, or ensure consistent browser rendering.
Prioritize the use of standard HTML elements and attributes. Only use custom elements or Web Components if you cannot use native elements or if you require them for the purposes of producing reusable design system components.
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Accessibility: Applying semantic approaches means your content will be easier to navigate via assistive technologies and keyboard. Many tags phave native semantics, reducing the need for additional tagging. This can also help technologies to better understand your content. better.
Conversion: Ensuring your code is efficient and works reduces the risk of broken features and users giving up.
Economic: Conforming to accessibility legislation and regulations avoid lawsuits and fines.
Environment: Following standards ensures users have a coherent experience - reducing bugs, saving time spent fixing bugs, and avoiding wasted resources. Bloated markup can otherwise lead to waste data, while broken markup can even trigger memory leaks.
Performance: Clean, modern code renders better than deprecated or poorly maintained code. While Web Components do outperform framework components, they cannot outperform the native elements they are built on.
Economic: If data is not loaded unless needed, you will reduce your server's bandwidth use.
Environment: Lazy loading videos and images so that they are only loaded once required by the user. This reduces transferred data and the required processing power.
Performance: Allowing text to render first make the user feel that everything is loading faster while, as the remaining content loads in the background or on demand.
Accessibility: Including skip links and other accessibility aids can accelerate the user journey, reducing system resources required and allowing them to find the content they need.
Conversion: Providing clearly navigable structures and sitemaps ensure search engines are better able to index content.
Economic: Enabling quicker visits that complete the user's objective can help to encourage return visits.
Environment: Reducing the time people spend searching for the information they want and aiding them on their journey will reduce energy use, including battery drain.
Social Equity: Allowing users to achieve objectives faster reduces resource consumption while potentially enhancing user health and well-being.
Economic: Fixing issues immediately and keeping people in the process can help to prevent abandonment.
Performance: Enabling users to fill in forms more efficiently and avoid navigating back to where they were or refilling data on forms can increase the speed of necessary form filing and reduce errors in completion.
Security: Allowing people to correct input errors, verify their input prior to submission, and identifying errors early in the process can help to prevent costly data protection mistakes.
Include necessary meta tag references that are commonly recognized and used by user agents such as search engines. Follow recognized standards and vocabularies such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) or RDFa.
Economic: Improving metadata can make it easier for search engines, social networks, or other platforms to present your content appropriately. This can lead to better search engine visibility, more users, and potentially better conversion.
Performance: Providing third-party tools and search engines with the information they need can direct people more quickly to the content they need.
Transparency: Metadata ensures clients find the correct content fast. If users only require something basic, such as contact details, they may not even have to view the content directly - saving bandwidth.
Accommodate common user preferences, such as prefers-color-scheme, with corresponding CSS media queries. Consider accounting for additional user preferences, including monochrome, prefers-contrast, prefers-reduced-data, prefers-reduced-transparency, and prefers-reduced-motion preference queries where these will benefit your users. Use print and scripting media queries when they can improve sustainability.
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Accessibility: Having a high contrast version of a site will reduce barriers to entry and time wasted for visually impaired users. Reduced motion can also accommodate other accessibility requirements.
Conversion: Delivering better user experience by meeting their preferences can improve conversion and encourage repeat visits.
Economic: Using print media queries within style sheets can reduce users' ink use and paper costs.
Environment: Accommodating dark mode when preferred will always be more energy efficient on OLED devices. Similarly, animation and media have a significant impact on CPU and GPU usage, so respecting a prefers reduced motion query will reduce energy consumption. The presence of a monochrome preference query could encourage greater adoption of energy-efficient e-ink devices. A sustainability-optimized print style sheet can save both paper and ink output.
Performance: Allowing users to access a reduced-data version of a site could significantly reduce the data transferred and the resulting carbon footprint. This can improve performance and reduce costs for individuals on a metered data plan. Detecting if scripting is disabled and offering alternative content may save wasted effort and improve the performance of a project.
Social Equity: Meeting user preferences is a positive shift: You are not telling your users how they should 'experience your content, but following your users' preferences or a device' capabilities and the priority of constituencies.
Allow your project to work and adapt seamlessly across a variety of devices and screen sizes, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, smart TVs, and other emerging platforms. This ensures that content and functionality can be easily accessed and are suitably optimized for display on both smaller mobile devices and larger displays without limiting accessibility, usability, or design features on any specific device type. Implement robust fallback strategies to ensure that the digital product or service will not fail if it encounters unsupported technologies.
Use progressive enhancement to enhance overall sustainability. This can involve a single approach or a careful combination, such as adaptive design, mobile-first design, or dynamic serving.
Use carbon-aware design techniques to maximize your use of carbon-free energy. This is achieved by adapting the delivery of your project to current electricity availability and user grid load. This should include using situational design to reduce the codebase and disable non-essential functionality during high-intensity periods. Similarly, it should be possible to adapt the user interface to perform better with reduced hardware resources, where this measure can be taken to avoid scaling hardware resources and the resultant increase in emissions. It can also include designing algorithms that can automatically disable features based on set thresholds.
Support additional indirect methods of interaction, such as voice (speech), code (QR, etc.), reader view (browser, application, or RSS), or connected technologies (watch, appliance, transport, etc.).
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Accessibility: Incorporating large, touch-friendly buttons, simplified navigation menus, and clear readable fonts on your mobile websites can make it easier for individuals with visual or motor impairments to interact with your content. A device-adaptable strategy that considers the limitations of each approach helps to maximize accessibility and usability across all devices, enhancing accessibility and optimizing experience.
Conversion: Broadening the compatibility of your products and services can equally broaden their appeal and use, even in scenarios you may not have originally envisaged.
Economic: Ensuring your website or application works well on desktop devices, smartphones, and other resolutions alike can provide a financial benefit by enabling individuals to make purchases wherever and whenever it suits them.
Social Equity: Ensuring content works well on older and low-powered devices is important, as these are more frequently used in developing nations.
Integrate energy-relevant APIs - such as Battery Status, Compression Streams, Page Visibility, or Vibration - where these can reduce energy consumption.
Conversion: Creating fallbacks for technology that might fail can 'enable sales you would otherwise miss out on.
Economic: Providing easier, reliable access in more situations allows you to sell to more people.
Environment: Reducing unnecessary visual effects - such as animations - when a page is not visible, helps to prevent wasted processing in background tabs. This can potentially help users who leave multiple tabs open conserve battery.
Performance: Using low-impact scripting can reduce heavy codebase sizes. Providing fallbacks for unavailable JavaScript ensures older or less capable devices can still access your content.
Privacy: Allowing script-free users to easily access your content can protect the privacy of users with increased privacy needs.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High
Example
const audio = document.querySelector("audio");
// Handle page visibility change:
// - If the page is hidden, pause the video
// - If the page is shown, play the video
document.addEventListener("visibilitychange", () => {
if (document.hidden) {
audio.pause();
} else {
audio.play();
}
});
Tags
Accessibility, JavaScript, Security
3.15 Ensure that your code is secure
Regularly check code for exploitable security issues that could affect both users and hosting infrastructure.
Economic: Preventing security issues ahead of time c protects you and your users from financial crime.
Environment: Securing your project against threats and closing vulnerabilities makes them a less likely target for individuals who might exploit them, consuming vast amounts of data in the process.
Performance: Protecting your project against breaches reduces your risk of large amounts of data being stolen, corrupted, or destroyed.
Security: Maintaining security helps to maintain trust and prevent personal information from being exposed and exploited.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium
Tags
JavaScript, Privacy, Security, Social Equity
3.16 Use dependencies appropriately and ensure maintenance
Use libraries and frameworks only where necessary, when vanilla code or smaller packages are inappropriate for the use case, and they are kept up to date.
Prevent developers from downloading and installing libraries and frameworks to run client-side when they are not needed by checking for unused dependencies. Follow up by uninstalling those that are not needed.
Limit your use of libraries and frameworks to the genuinely necessary as this will reduce the amount of code that has to be downloaded and parsed by the browser. Consider whether you can use vanilla code instead. Check the package size and whether individual modules can be installed and imported individually, as opposed to the entire library.
Include favicon.ico, robots.txt, opensearch.xml, site.webmanifest, and sitemap.xml files by default. Also ensure that any similar files defined in future web standards or specifications are included.
Include beneficial files such as ads.txt, carbon.txt, humans.txt, security.txt. Also ensure that any similar files defined in future web standards or specifications are included.
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Accessibility: Integrating expected files enables the browser''s default search box to search a service, replacing any custom solution. This can increase accessibility as it encourages the use of a browser-native component and/or keyboard shortcuts, which can often better meet accessibility requirements.
Conversion: Configuring robots.txt appropriately can help to ensure content is correctly indexed and users are better guided to appropriate content on your project.
Economic: Including robots.txt and sitemap files helps search engines to discover and index your website. This can lead to more users and potentially more customers. The ads.txt file may reduce advertising fraud and could similarly benefit your business.
Environment: Providing files expected by search engines or browsers will reduce loading errors and may improve efficiency in how users find or interact with a site. Plain text requires no rendering. If users or search engines are able to find these files, such as carbon.txt, they can load more quickly and with less CPU/GPU impact than any formatted webpage.
Performance: Satisfying requests for expected files improves interactions with search engines or browsers requesting them, while also potentially avoiding additional requests once they are discovered. Plain text files contain no links, no markup, and has a low rendering impact. Including details such as site credits in such a file will reduce data transfer and have a lower rendering footprint.
Transparency: Providing a humans.txt file allows you to credit the people involved in the creation process, while security.txt provides critical points of contact if an issue is discovered. Both increase transparency.
Avoid using deprecated, proprietary, or outdated formats and web standards. Always adopt up-to-date, widely recognized standards. Only use deprecated, proprietary, or outdated code where this is required to meet a documented customer need and if there is a justifiable benefit that cannot otherwise be met. Justifiable reasons could include compatibility with essential legacy systems and/or hardware, accessibility, or emissions reduction. Use polyfills only when necessary, and regularly audit code to see if they can be removed.
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Accessibility: Using modern web standards helps to ensure better support in assistive technologies.
Environment: Avoiding deprecated standards ensures your code is optimized for and supported by modern browsers, ensuring full functionality and a smooth experience. This helps to reduce browsing time and associated energy use.
Performance: Moving on from deprecated or less efficient standards increases the longevity of your digital product or service and reduces the need for a carbon-intensive redesign.
Security: Keeping up with modern standards reduces the risk of security exploits.
3.19 Use the most efficient solution for your service
Identify the project requirements, use the most efficient approach, aim for static over dynamic where possible, and consider the impact of extensions and components.
Identify the requirements and use this as a basis to help you select the most appropriate implementation for your project. A simpler technological implementation may use more human resources but could have a smaller footprint. A prebuilt solution may use more system resources and have a bigger emissions impact on render, but it could have a faster build time - meaning less carbon is emitted in development.
Use the most effective approach for your use case. Most of the time, coding from scratch will often provide the most performant results. Where an existing solution is present and is being actively maintained, this may be better optimized than what you can reasonably produce yourself. Favor native components and file systems over WYSIWYG editors - including visual page builders - or other heavy frameworks. Be mindful of the impact of third-party solutions.
Deliver static in place of dynamic content wherever possible. If you choose to use a code generation tool, then favor the most efficient tool available, such as Static Site Generators (SSGs). Content delivered by a dynamic CMS will involve much more server-side processing and uses bulkier libraries.
Carefully select and review plugins, extensions, and themes to maximize interoperability, accessibility, and performance. Audit these regularly over time to ensure continued compatibility.
Accessibility: Making assistive technologies a core part of project specifications from the very start and throughout a product or service''s lifecycle improves access for people with disabilities.
Economic: Avoiding tooling at risk of overburdening user experience may result in financial savings, especially if tooling has associated maintenance expenses, licensing fees, or subscription costs.
Environment: Evaluating long-term technology implications and taking the time to ensure they are optimized and efficiently utilized helps a team measurably reduce the environmental impact of a product or service.
Performance: Reducing complexity in your infrastructure will increase developer productivity, while also reducing overhead. This further reduces emissions.
Privacy: Prioritizing security and user privacy helps an organization better comply with current and emerging legislation.
Security: Maintaining a software product and restricting your use of third-party solutions to the essential will improve overall security.
Use the most appropriate programming language for the task. Many tools and programming languages are optimized for the performance of particular tasks. Applying the most appropriate tools to the problem can justify any time or effort involved in their adoption, especially if there is a reasonable user base, provided it does not impact the wellbeing of those involved or risk becoming cost-prohibitive.
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Economic: Using the latest and more performant language version can help hosting companies to reduce their costs. That could be beneficial for the company and customers alike.
Environment: Using the latest language version can improve efficiency and reduce data center energy consumption. Although do verify that benefits are worthwhile before major build upgrades.
Performance: Updating the language version will often offer performance improvements. Compiled languages, such as C or Rust, can have greatly reduced execution times and energy usage for algorthims compared to the same algorithms written in interpreted languages, such as Python or JavaScript.
Security: Maintaining update and upgrade schedules is good for security, allowing you to reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities in older versions.
Economic: Using existing features means you do not need to invest more time in 'development or maintenance, which reduces costs.
Environment: Avoiding repetition of pre-existing features improves efficiency, which ultimately will reduce redundancy, development time, and emissions associated with building the product or service.
Performance: Using browser-native functionality and features allows you to take advantage of their natural optimization. They will generally load faster while using fewer resources. Custom components are unlikely to beat their performance.
Optimize database queries, especially for frequently accessed information. If you need information that is stored in a database, and you require it or it is likely to be requested more than once in your code, the database should only be accessed once and the data stored locally for subsequent processing. Avoid relying on framework helpers that might defer filtering to later in the process.
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Economic: Optimizing the codebase to avoid pushing multiple additional demands to the server reduces bandwidth overheads, while also reducing the risk of stress failures and lost business.
Environment: Filtering out unneeded data at a deeper level of the application can reduce energy usage, as it reduces the processing required for (de)serialization.
Performance: Holding the data locally rather than remotely eliminates the need to wait for additional requests to process the query. Relational databases and other specialist data stores are usually heavily optimized for data filtering and retrieval. Performing transformations at this level of the application creduces processing time and delivers responses faster.
Even data has a home. Whether you are developing tools, processing data, maintaining online systems, operating websites or something else - conscious choices in this area can have an enormous impact.
Sustainable or green web hosting, infrastructure, and systems covers the energy our data centers use, but it ultimately goes much further: It is also about where and what data is processed or stored and the technologies used. Conscious provisioning choices and best practices can improve both sustainability and operational efficiency.
Goals include:
Find sustainable providers for hosting, CDNs, and other third-party solutions.
Adjust back-end settings to ensure proper caching, compression, and error handling.
Ensure your processes reflect best practices to maximize efficiency and sustainability.
Benefits include:
Reduced system resource requirements mean potential cost savings both in hardware and in energy use.
Efficient, sustainable hosting, infrastructure, and systems can create new marketing opportunities for your business: impressing green-minded or privacy-driven customers.
Gain economic benefits in the form of reduced hardware investment and/or operational expenses and lower maintenance costs thanks to better processes and appropriate provisioning of resources.
Plain language summary of Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems
Select a green hosting provider with a scalable plan that meets your requirements, in the location where you need it.
Optimize your files, while ensuring appropriate file-related caching and error handling.
Automate processes and services where and when able.
Manage the processing and storage of data with care.
Monitor the sustainability impact of projects using metrics.
4.1 Choose a sustainable service provider
Ensure hosting and domain service providers support monitoring of resource use, use carbon-free electricity, and maintain and recycle equipment properly.
Monitor key indicators to assess and transparently report the environmental impact of hosting and identify overconsumption. These include energy and water usage, but also hardware factors, such as CPU usage and memory usage. Similarly, track the allocation of servers and CPU cores to optimize resource efficiency. Consumers should monitor and providers should both calculate and transparently share, environmental impact metrics. Metrics should include Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE).
Maintain hardware to extend its lifespan as long as possible. Use it efficiently at an appropriate capacity, and ensuring it has the necessary certifications. New purchases should be from reliable long-lifespan suppliers.
Use electricity with the lowest possible carbon intensity. Examine location-based emissions factors to calculate the carbon intensity of available electricity from the regional grid. Include the impact of on-site electricity generation, including backup generators, in calculations.
Balance unavoidable remaining carbon emissions with high-quality market based instruments or other evolving instruments from the voluntary carbon market, until additional carbon-free energy resources become available. The quality of market-based instruments should be verified by non-profit third-party organizations with sufficient supporting evidence.
The impact of domain names is disclosed by registries and registrars, and registrants consider and (where possible) mitigate against these environmental issues.
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Conversion: In cases where a badge or link about sustainable hosting providers appears on a website, users concerned about the issue may use and reuse the site preferentially.
Environment: Using hosting providers that operate with lower emissions, better power efficiency, and more responsible electronic waste management reduces negative environmental impacts from websites and products.
Social Equity: Hosting providers with transparent environmental sustainability are minimizing the negative impacts on their local communities.
Transparency: Sharing the efficiency and carbon-free energy metrics of hosting services allows the public to verify and understand sustainable websites and products.
Use server-side caching where possible to reduce processing time and repeated database lookups or API calls. Configure caching via server settings to control file-type expiration using appropriate headers, such as Expires or Cache-Control. Cache dynamic page responses where possible to serve static versions to future users. Support client-side caching of frequently used static assets to minimize repeat server requests.
Ensure resources remain available and accessible even if the user is disconnected, using methods such as JavaScript Service Workers, Web Workers, and browser local storage features.
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Economic: Bandwidth to serve users cost money and reducing the amount of data transfer saves money.
Environment: Caching enables websites to deliver content without unnecessary server requests, sparing the carbon emissions driven by networks and the data center.
Performance: Enabling browser caching can reduce page reload speeds for return users and deliver better website performance.
Social Equity: Optimizing browser caching often enables users to view content when their network connection has failed or when they must use a low quality network.
Use server-side compression to reduce file sizes before delivery. Server-side compression settings and tools can be used to compress most commonly used file types, reducing energy consumption while minimizing load times, saving bandwidth, and improving overall performance.
Environment: Applying compression effectively reduces network demand, consequently lowering power consumption and carbon emissions.
Performance: Reducing data transfer volumes and data consumption delivers faster performance to all users.
Social Equity: Decreasing demand on networks enables users with slower network connections to enjoy the same experience and performance as users with high speed networks.
Set up proper error handling and error pages to clearly inform users when something goes wrong, guide them back to useful content, and maintain a consistent, trustworthy experience.
Regularly audit to check for broken and outdated links. Update these as necessary and add redirects to guide users and search engines to the correct content to ensure efficient browsing and protect SEO value. Test all redirects to ensure they function as intended and avoid impactful redirect loops. Favor the most efficient redirection system for your setup (e.g., server rules over database lookups).
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Accessibility: Error pages and appropriate redirects matter because every user requires appropriate assistance to find their path. Navigation and signage that successfully support individuals with cognitive disabilities to find their path deliver the best design for all users.
Conversion: Users who find their way out of an error quickly have a faster and more enjoyable experience that encourages return visits.
Economic: Every page load costs money, so minimizing erroneous page loads saves money.
Environment: When users load fewer pages on their way to desired content, a project becomes less carbon intensive.
Minimize the number of active environments, including virtualized environments (such as containers). Audit codebases for unused branches and environments and remove them as appropriate.
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Economic: Removing unnecessary environments reduces the resources that must be provisioned. This reduces infrastructure, maintenance, and process costs.
Environment: Power and energy resources will be conserved from avoiding utilizing unnecessary environments and lowering carbon emissions will result.
Social Equity: Scaling back the usage of data centers reduces the need for new facilities that may bring negative community impacts and strain national resources.
Automate recurring tasks, such as deployment, testing, and compilation in alignment with continuous integration and continuous delivery best practices.
Use automated scaling to promptly adjust server capacity up or down based on demand, ensuring efficient resource allocation. Implement buffering and throttling to manage load and maintain performance without overprovisioning.
Restrict the activity of unwanted and unnecessary third-party crawlers, suspicious user agents, unwanted users, bots, and scrapers from accessing or downloading your content. Follow best practices, such as server access rules and security tools, while ensuring your content remains accessible to users, search engines and any helpful, welcome crawlers. Consider that scrapers may be used to inform and train large language models.
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Economic: Maximizing the number of tasks carried out rapidly by machine brings down maintenance and infrastructure costs.
Environment: Optimizing workflows can reduce the amount of energy used during peak periods where it may be most costly or unsustainable to run.
Operations: Automating repetitive tasks allows humans to focus on valuable, novel, and creative tasks that can offer greater job satisfaction and expand skills.
Security: Evading unwanted bots, crawlers, and similar users protects websites from harm and avoids potential downtime.
Define the revalidation and refresh frequency for the cache, local data, and page content based on user needs, balancing performance, data accuracy, and resource efficiency.
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Ensure backups of system and user data are secure and incremental to minimize storage use, reduce backup time, and protect against data loss or breaches.
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Economic: Using efficient backup processes that are automated and include only incremental changes to critical data results in less storage being used, reducing costs.
Environment: Designing backups as efficiently as possible minimizes power consumption and carbon emissions by eliminating excess processes and storage.
Performance: Ensuring the availability of critical data allows continuation or speedier resumption of service when problems occur, such as data loss or outages.
Security: Keeping efficient, stable, and well-protected backups is good practice, meaning work, data, and business value are not irreparably lost during a data breach.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Tags
Hardware, Performance
4.9 Consider the impact and requirements of data processing
Account for the energy involved in data transfer, considering factors such as the protocol used, whether it is processed client- or server-side, and the environment used.
Use existing and supported carbon-aware computing methods to automate batching and scheduling according to real-time electrical grid carbon intensity data or shift workloads to lower-carbon regions to optimize sustainability while maintaining performance.
Choose communication protocols appropriate to user needs and the type of data being transferred. Avoid insecure options such as HTTP and FTP, and prioritize secure, efficient alternatives such as HTTPS and SSH. Use modern protocols to take advantage of newer features, while maintaining backward compatibility for older devices.
Consider using event-driven architecture and microservices when building products with state changes that do not require full page refreshes. Favor these where they offer a more energy-efficient alternative to traditional APIs based on performance, power, and processing factors. Choose the approach that reduces server workload and environmental impact.
Avoid redundant processing. When data processing is necessary, carefully compare the relative effects of client- versus server-side processing based on efficiency, performance, security, and sustainability metrics to make an informed decision.
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Economic: Improving the efficiency of data processing saves money due to energy and infrastructure needs.
Environment: Running servers for less time reduces carbon emissions.
Performance: Processing data in energy efficient batches can reduce thrashing of hardware during high-intensity periods, maintaining performance stability.
Social Equity: Reducing data processing demand means the resources that data centres demand, and can place a strain on local communities can also be reduced.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Tags
JavaScript, Networking, Performance
4.10 Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) appropriately
Use CDNs where they bring a sustainability benefit, ensuring the provider itself is sustainable, has nodes local to an audience, and they are only used to serve static resources on them.
Deploy static content, assets, and other read-only resources via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on a case-by-case basis, where judged to be beneficial. Carefully evaluate the environmental impact of any CDN service used, similar to a web hosting provider.
When serving an exclusively local audience, consider whether a CDN is required at all. Instead, select hosting providers with servers close to your target audience.
Avoid deploying dynamic or frequently changing resources to a CDN. Browser behaviors such as cache partitioning and cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) can limit performance gains, hinder caching and interaction, and attempting to override these can introduce security or privacy risks. This does not apply to static assets or JSON files, which are well suited to CDN delivery.
Perform data transformations, transfers, and processing between the layers of an application as close to the source as possible. This reduces unnecessary serialization overhead and avoids wasting resources.
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Economic: Using a CDN may save money because their data transfer rates are often cheaper than hosting providers.
Environment: Using a CDN to host content closer to users lowers network-related carbon emissions while also reducing user device energy use because they can load content more quickly.
Performance: Using a CDN to locate content closer to users gives them faster access to content.
Select infrastructure that meets your requirements and customer agreements without over-provisioning. Favor standalone instances over multi-zone or distributed setups when requirements allow. Provision for average loads rather than peaks to ensure efficient resource use. Use autoscaling to handle fluctuations without underutilizing infrastructure.
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Environment: Reducing provisioned resources reduces wasted energy and water costs, even when resources are not used to capacity.
Operations: Keeping a closer eye on actual and anticipated use allows an organization to better understand its own functions and anticipate future needs.
Economic: Avoiding overprovisioning means avoiding unnecessary costs.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Tags
E-Waste, Hardware, Performance
4.12 Store data according to the needs of your users
Set expiration dates on data so it can be archived, made available offline, or removed when no longer used or required, with the remaining content tagged for future management.
Assign expiration and/or maximum retention dates to stored data where appropriate, treating excess data as a form of technical debt. Simultaneously observe any applicable minimum data retention periods. Make data cleanup an established organization-wide routine to prevent long-term data accumulation.
Implement a data classification and tagging policy to improve visibility, simplify management, and enable efficient removal of outdated or unused data.
Optimize log collection and storage by scheduling backups during low-activity hours, rotating logs appropriately, and using off-site, sustainable providers.
Make large, long-term assets available for easy download in order to provide users with regular offline access without requiring persistant server resources.
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Designing websites and applications for better sustainability requires good business strategy and product management.
Anyone who owns, manages, or operates a website or application has significant capacity to improve the sustainability footprint of their organization. Business owners and other C-level executives are likely to be the main people responsible for the most impactful strategic decisions an organization can make. But all individuals working online can also make a big difference. Work in this area can improve the sustainability of various non-technical considerations that stretch beyond, or affect, a digital product or service.
Goals include:
Use your influence to ensure projects are developed more sustainably, at scale, across organizations of different sizes.
Raise awareness while publicly disclosing and reporting on your efforts.
Support your organization from within to ensure it and its staff are better able to meet relevant targets.
Benefits include:
Proper evaluation and reporting make it easier to meet compliance targets, comply with legislation, and avoid the risk of potential lawsuits.
Transparency about your sustainability impact can improve public perception of your company. This can boost customer loyalty and staff retention alike - reducing associated costs.
Clear policies and continuity planning build trust in your organization, while providing the opportunity to identify quantifiable risks and include relevant affected parties.
Appreciating users' time and resources can improve trust in a product or organization.
Plain language summary of Business Strategy and Product Management
Plan, create, and maintain policies and statements to cover sustainability initiatives.
Appoint someone to take responsibility for sustainability. Inform and train others.
Make efforts to understand your impact. Set goals and targets. Report, verify, and disclose your progress.
If a project is necessary, document its evolution and manage its lifespan.
Share benefits with your workers. Involve all relevant affected parties in the decision-making process.
Be ethical in your approach to sensitive materials, including data, or emerging technologies, such as AI.
Be an inclusive workplace.
Give back to good causes and support open-source initiatives
5.1 Have an ethical and sustainable product strategy
Produce policies and documents showcasing evidence, achievements, and onboarding underpinned by good governance.
Develop, publish and maintain key policies, such as a code of ethics, product guidelines, sustainability statements, and/or other documents that include language specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs. Make these publicly accessible and transparently versioned formats.
Provide evidence to demonstrate how digital sustainability policies, climate policies, and related practices are effectively implemented, monitored, and governed over time.
Document your methodology through impact storytelling, documentation, and creating resources to help individuals make more informed decisions and raise awareness among your users.
Economic: Communicating the ways you can share the economic benefits of your digital work raises awareness of social inequalities. Similarly, enabling users to make more informed decisions can ensure your project is more financially sustainable overall.
Environment: Establishing clear sustainability statements should make it easier to align organizational policies and practices with measurable metrics and support goals. Integrating this early in the digital product strategy can improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
Operations: Establishing ethical and sustainability policies can help to ensure product teams are more engaged in the work they are doing.
Privacy: Reducing your emissions and explaining to your audience how you aim to keep to your sustainability commitments provides the opportunity to highlight other key issues of interest to your users, such as privacy and security. This can boost user trust in your brand.
Social Equity: Highlighting intersectional social issues in documentation, storytelling, and marketing materials raises awareness of problems and potential solutions.
Transparency: Maintaining clear and public-facing policies helps internal and external affected parties to better understand an organization's sustainability commitments, while making it easier to report on the impact of these efforts.
Assign a sustainability advocate with specific digital expertise and provide them with the resources, budget, tools, and time they need to achieve their stated goals. In some organizations, expanding this into a climate working group comprising motivated individuals can add further benefits.
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Accessibility: Nominating a sustainability representative helps the organization remove barriers to access. These can inherently cost bandwidth, have monetary value, and carry potential legal implications.
Environment: Appointing dedicated sustainability representatives means they can maintain quality assurance and guide decisions that measurably reduce the environmental impact of your digital products and services.
Privacy: Having dedicated sustainability representatives on the team enables them to maintain intersectional data privacy standards and watch out for legal compliance issues within the organization.
Social Equity: Ensuring someone on the team is dedicated to these concerns will help to reduce the digital divide through internal awareness raising and requesting features or information be provided to support those, for example on older devices or in low-bandwidth areas.
Inform and deliver training to all affected parties, including product teams, colleagues, and organizational decision-makers - both managers and clients - in both general and digital climate literacy, as well as your own sustainable technology policies.
Provide active and routine training where possible to develop, establish, and refresh skills relating to sustainability. This can be delivered as in-house training, courses, workshops, events, webinars, meetups, or other ongoing or on-demand methods that support your team in achieving sustainability objectives.
Encourage participants to reduce their environmental impact. Share climate and sustainable initiatives and ideas. Provide resources on sustainable design, best practices, and concepts to assist them.
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Environment: Keeping your team informed and educated may promote systemic change in the way they build, the way they manage their work and technical infrastructure, and even the way they do business or live their day-to-day lives - even outside the workplace.
Operations: Publishing clear sustainability goals and sharing resources encourages organizational affected parties to examine their own current status quo and make their own progress.
Conversion: Communicating the impact and allowing the user to set preferences with the environmental impact in mind can encourage more individuals to make environmentally friendly choices and improve your image among ethical consumers.
Environment: Allowing users to select more environmentally friendly settings within software naturally reduces the environmental impact.
Performance: Reducing unnecessary or wasteful, less sustainable behaviors will often improve performance and accessibility, as these are often interlinked.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium
Tags
Content, Education, Marketing, Reporting
5.5 Estimate the environmental impact
Calculate the environmental impact of the project and any tooling you use, and even that of a competitor, where possible, as this may be useful for comparison.
Include the impact or estimated impact of any tooling or third-party solutions used at any stage in your pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions generated in production, maintenance, and use are also integral to your overall solution.
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Accessibility: Auditing for accessibility can be included as a key part of a digital Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), provided the key parameters are defined up front and maintained throughout the project to eliminate barriers to access. These parameters can include conformity with WCAG guidance, including manual checks.
Environment: Conducting a rigorous LCA can reveal significant opportunities to reduce overall environmental impact through the identification and elimination of factors and vectors of digital emissions such as water and e-waste.
Performance: Including a detailed overview of optimizations in your LCA provides a clear direction to improve sustainability and performance.
Social Equity: Including intersectional social metrics in your LCA can provide an opportunity to simultaneously consider and work on issues such as inequality, which also affect sustainability.
Define and publish a clear set of sustainability goals. Publicly communicate how these goals can be met, including which performance metrics can be measured to help the organization and its various affected parties act more sustainably.
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Economic: Aligning with existing standards or frameworks makes it easier for organizations to include digital impact in their overall sustainability reporting.
Environment: Setting, measuring, and communicating clear sustainability goals aligns an organization's impact aspirations with ongoing efforts to meet these goals.
Transparency: Helping affected parties such as employees, clients, and partners to better understand how the organization creates shared value in its various sustainability policies and programs.
Economic: Certifications, vetted for conflicts of interest, can operationalize sustainability principles and verify and endorse levels of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.
Operations: Obtaining third-party sustainability certifications can make it easier for organizations to align operational practices with their mission, vision, and values, and communicate this to their affected parties.
Create and/or deliver dedicated training manuals, workshops, and materials to outline the sustainability policies and practices adopted and how to implement them. Manage and maintain these materials over time, adapting them as new policies and best practices arise.
Incentivize leadership, teams, and individuals to make progress toward the goals outlined in their training. Examples include dedicating time for sustainability-related activities, recognizing completion, and other benefits.
Economic: Providing sustainability training and onboarding practices has been shown to lead to higher retention rates, improved performance, and improved systems for maintaining business continuity.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High
Tags
Education, Strategy
5.9 Support mandatory disclosures and reporting
Create policies and documents showing evidence of commitment towards impact progress, how this is achieved, and any applicable regulations you are meeting.
Create and publish policies and practices to disclose the social and environmental impacts of its products, programs, and services in line with existing reporting standards such as GRI, SASB, etc.
Publicly and transparently demonstrate commitment over time to following and adopting existing and/or emerging environmental standards and legislative policy that promotes mandatory emissions disclosures and reporting.
Clearly identify how environmental impact is being reduced, with careful avoidance of double accounting, greenwashing, data exclusion, or other misleading or manipulative techniques.
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Conversion: Demonstrating transparency through regular reporting and showing measurable improvement over time can increase an organization's appeal to potential employees, partners, potential customers, investors, and suppliers who perceive shared values and an aligned mission.
Economic: Being ahead of the curve affords businesses greater resilience in the face of more rigorous standards.
Environment: Adopting reporting standards ahead of schedule provides more immediate environmental benefits, and allows you to mitigate environmental issues before they build into more complex or long-lasting ones.
Complete and operationalize a theory of change process with requisite documentation to identify the impact the organization aspires to achieve, how it will generate revenue, how it will create shared or added value from these activities, and how it will measure results based on desired outcomes. In the case of projects already underway, how these are generating revenue and actively tracking and measuring progress against desired outcomes.
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Environment: Business models focused on the customer and the wider ecosystem rather than just financial indicators can benefit the environment such as through reducing overconsumption of resources and disencouraging incentives for unethical behavior, leading to a reduction of emissions.
Social Equity: Adding social indicators (such as the shared value within digital services) can reduce negative social impacts such as impoverishment or exploitation.
Appropriately resource products over time via staffing and budgeting to support code refactoring, address technical debt, introduce new product features, test functionality, and produce product or service maintenance plans to continue supporting customers, users, and other affected parties.
Economic: Maintaining performance can boost customer retention, and organizations with clear product maintenance and management practices tend to benefit from greater resilience in the face of digital disruption.
Environment: Implementing product management and maintenance strategies provides another opportunity to improve climate resilience and manage and reduce emissions over time.
Performance: Following good product management and maintenance strategies means affected digital products and services benefit from better security, reduced technical debt, and improved data privacy.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High
Tags
Compatibility, Strategy
5.12 Implement continuous improvement procedures
Continuously improve projects through regular reviews and iteration, integrating technical debt and security management, determining if new or existing functionality is required.
Review deliverables and update frequency to ensure project teams have enough time to conduct user research, identify technical debt, and produce high-quality output as well as share what they learned.
Display a track record of continuous improvement (iteration) processes to analyze the digital product or service. Simultaneously address any potential consequences of ongoing experimentation, such as technical debt, product performance, and emissions. Analytics are limited to strictly necessary features that aid decision-making, encouraging user feedback, and comparing performance against business goals and user needs.
Justify and prioritize the retention of existing features, the creation of new functionality, and the decommissioning or elimination of unused functionality or low-traffic content throughout the product's life cycle on a case-by-case basis.
Provide corrective security and policy updates during the product or service life cycle. These should be distinguished from more extensive evolutionary updates.
Develop sustainable product and data strategies using appropriate training techniques. These should help your team build capacity and learn new skills to manage and maintain products and services over time.
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Accessibility: Adopting an iterative approach supports inclusive design, providing the agility and adaptability for organizations to expand their accessibility.
Conversion: Providing a reliable user experience boosts user trust, encouraging repeat business.
Economic: Ensuring agility and continuous improvement helps organizations be more resilient in the face of disruption and a changing climate. Long-term, these practices save the organization time, money, and resources.
Environment: Focusing on continuous improvement reduces waste and energy use by iteratively identifying opportunities to improve the product or service.
Operations: Fostering a culture of experimentation encourages innovation. This supports team building and improves overall organizational resilience and efficiency.
Performance: Establishing good review processes reduces buildup of technical debt. Focusing on continuous improvement rather than large single-scale releases means bottlenecks can be resolved, and they become apparent. This is helpful as new third-party tools, and software can affect performance without adaptation.
Privacy: Having a high-quality, regularly updated product or service will reduce the chances of a data breach, which improves privacy.
Security: Ensuring products or services are maintained and updated over time reduces risk and improves security.
When a feature is added, updated, or removed to improve user experience, clear documentation of the changes is provided in a well structured, semantically versioned document.
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Economic: Updating digital products and services regularly requires less development time and reduces the risk of negative consumer impact from the extended downtime that can result from needing to start from scratch if a product or service is otherwise left to become outdated beyond repair.
Environment: Maintaining an intuitive, lightweight user experience while adding new features or updating software reduces frustration, churn, and the energy users expend when the interface performs in ways users do not expect.
Performance: Maintaining an optimized user experience that is regularly updated in line with best practices usually means content and assets will load quickly and as expected by users.
Security: Maintaining evergreen status often means fewer issues due to a strong release cycle. This involves making necessary changes and keeping users informed while maintaining transparency.
5.14 Establish if a digital product or service is necessary
Determine whether a project is necessary, avoiding duplication of existing efforts, creating obstacles for users, and aligning with SDGs and sustainability principles.
Accessibility: Preventing unnecessary digital products or services from being created can make it easier to find and access existing information, provided an accessible replacement is available.
Economic: Reducing unnecessary research and development allows organizations to cut costs.
Environment: Determining that a digital product or service is not necessary means the potential environmental impacts associated with its creation and use can be avoided.
Operations: Avoiding creating unnecessary products or services prevents organizations from wasting time or resources on their creation and maintenance.
Economic: Applying standards of practice can help an organization better align affected party needs with its mission, vision, and values, which builds trust and improves relationships.
Environment: Vetting suppliers and partners can help an organization define, track, and reduce its scope 3 emissions.
Operations: Examining suppliers and partners more closely can increase diversity within the technology sector.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High
Tags
Content, Governance, Hardware, Ideation, Social Equity
5.17 Share economic benefits
Share benefits associated with being sustainably resilient with workers, incentivizing efforts, and advocating for those involved to meet sustainability goals.
Provide benefits to employees in accordance with resources, including, where relevant, healthcare, retirement planning, flex time, profit sharing, and more.
Align the project team's goals with key business objectives, and affected parties (for example, project managers) have the power and autonomy to make key decisions on the organization's behalf.
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Environment: Emissions can be reduced through group action and commitments at an organizational level.
Operations: Incentivizing project teams with key sustainability goals and granting the authority to make decisions based on these criteria enables them to measurably improve a range of metrics within the business, design, development, and infrastructure categories.
Provide JEDI-related training materials and schedule regular workshops related to how this topic manifests itself in digital products and services, covering topics such as algorithmic bias, digital divide, employment, mis- and disinformation.
Accessibility: Incorporating more diverse affected party perspectives leads to enacting more inclusive policies, often resulting in better products, services, and programs. JEDI practices boost an organization's resilience and ability to collaborate. This improves diversity in the tech sector and the overall accessibility of the web.
Economic: Having clear policies and practices reduces the risk of legal issues.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High
Tags
Accessibility, Ideation, Social Equity, Strategy
5.20 Promote responsible data practices
Provide publicly accessible versions of documents required by law in a sustainable, easy-to-consume format, while also observing ethical data retention practices.
Maintain a publicly accessible privacy policy, terms and conditions, and any other documents as required by law in the jurisdictions in which the product or service operates. Adhere to the most restrictive data protection regulations, especially when providing services outside the organization's country. Provide documents in accessible formats and use clear, user-friendly language to ensure comprehension by all users. Avoid unnecessary jargon, technical language, and legalese. Support emerging legislation and implement best practices related to data privacy, sustainability, and responsible data management.
Demonstrate measurable progress over time in regard to respecting data privacy and ownership. Specify how data disposal and a user's "right to be forgotten" or opt-out will be handled, along with ownership rights. Also, provide the ability to download or export data they have contributed into a non-proprietary format.
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Economic: Prioritizing data privacy and other responsible data practices reduces associated risk and costs, increases resilience, and often fosters better relationships with customers and other affected parties.
Archive and delete outdated or otherwise expired product content and data via automated expiration dates and scheduled product audits. Publish the archiving schedule, ensuring a lightweight version of the old searchable content is maintained for those that may require it.
Economic: Requiring less data reduces storage requirements, allowing organizations to scale down their hosting package or be charged less for pay-by-use infrastructure costs.
Environment: Storing less data reduces the computing power required to maintain a service, reducing energy and infrastructure-related emissions.
Performance: Moving older and less relevant content onto a smaller scaled-down version of your digital product or service will reduce your bandwidth usage. Archived information will have significantly fewer users, meaning this is unlikely to have a negative impact on their experience.
Privacy: Improving data management supports better data protection practices.
You can find details about complying with [GRI] through the body behind the standard.
GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low
Tags
Privacy, Security, Social Equity, Strategy
5.22 Promote and implement responsible emerging technology practices
Implement policies, training, and auditing practices for new or emerging technologies to ensure sustainability upon implementation, while accounting for associated legal issues.
Establish public-facing policies for emerging technologies. Ensure all such technologies and their datasets are ethically sourced, screened, validated, and implemented in a non-discriminatory, responsible manner.
Audit and account for any environmental considerations that may derive from the use of emerging technologies wishing to be promoted or implemented. This should include third-party choices, the expense in terms of waste or emissions of using the technology to create a desired result, and consequences that may arise from its deployment.
Ensure all automated tooling, scrapers, spiders, bots, artificial intelligence, and other forms of machine-assisted data gathering abides by requests to opt out at the host, server, or website level. Providers must declare themselves as non-human within the user-agent/HTTP header. Providers must also publish impact reports relating to their gathering activities.
Do not roll out post-quantum encryption for high-traffic services that do not need resilience against harvest now, decrypt later attacks, where attackers steal encrypted data, anticipating that future quantum computers will be powerful enough to break the encryption and make the data readable at a later date.
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Economic: Establishing clear policies related to digital disruption and emerging technologies makes organizations more resilient and better able to pivot quickly, and face less risk from various threats, including legal action.
Operations: Prioritizing ongoing learning and continuous improvement builds stronger teams that can adapt more quickly.
Economic: Sourcing responsible financing for digital products and services improves their resilience and saves the organization time, money, and resources over time.
Environment: Divesting from fossil fuels moves us more quickly to an economy that is powered by carbon-free energy, which can reduce the catastrophic impacts of climate change.
Engage in free or volunteer projects to help teams learn new tools and tactics, while also helping charities and non-profit organizations to build capacity.
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Economic: Following clear philanthropic strategies means there is usually a system of checks and balances in place to support better financial practices overall.
Operations: Having clear philanthropy strategies that include volunteer or free projects with team stretch goals can boost employee engagement and retention.
Economic: Removing redundancy in the product or service can generate savings in hosting, security costs, and other third-party subscriptions.
Environment: Planning for end-of-life reduces long-term environmental impacts after a digital product or service is no longer needed. This eliminates waste and frees up resources.
Performance: Removing unnecessary features, functions, and data of a service improves performance and resilience as the resources which were utilizing data will be better spent on more popular functionality, and the gains made from their elimination will be felt in terms of emissions through saved development time.
Privacy: Incorporating clear end-of-life policies that include a user's right to be forgotten will benefit the user by explaining how you enforce data protection and comply with legislation.
Security: Providing regular maintenance, updates, and care on outdated software and data can significantly reduce security risks.
Allow consumers to repair the consumables they purchase to the best of their ability, offering replacement components if possible at cost, and provide clear instructions to help resolve faults that occur.
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Economic: Extending the shelf-life of hardware and clear e-waste and recycling policies reduce costs.
Environment: Following clear e-waste and recycling policies reduces environmental impact and promotes circularity, while also extending the shelf life of hardware. When coupled with clear philanthropic policies, donated hardware can also support resource-constrained charities.
Use a performance budget to set a target maximum size of your digital product or service to monitor and reduce impact of data transfer, file type size, and more.
Define KPIs around engineering hours, development time, or sprints while keeping the health and well-being of your workers paramount. Sustainably optimize workflows to allow all tasks to be performed with care.
Conversion: Improving performance will reduce churn and page abandonment. A website may also rank better on search engines thanks to performance being a key indicator in ranking algorithms.
Economic: Reducing resource requirements means users will not have to keep upgrading devices to match the needs of digital products and services that are otherwise growing unchecked over time.
Environment: Setting a strict sustainability or performance budget will reduce the chance of a digital product or service getting too large or resulting in pollution transfers, which will also ensure it has a minimal impact on a user's device. This has a direct impact on emissions by forcing businesses to choose where to make reductions and efficiency savings. Users not having to upgrade devices as frequently will also reduce e-waste from discarded devices.
Performance: Keeping realistic goals regarding delivery size will push developers to optimize resource-heavy projects and reconsider using large tooling in place of lightweight alternatives. A lower target budget for a product or service will also decrease the amount of time spent transferring and rendering data.
Social Equity: By having a human or planetary budget, you can assign targets to improve services for impacted groups or those affected directly by your project.
Create, regularly review, and occasionally test a plan of action to determine readiness in case of an incident and establish procedures to quickly recover from any incident.
Economic: Limiting the extent of the disruption has obvious economic benefits.
Operations: Creating transparency around digital resilience procedures encourages trust that a product or service can be depended upon for critical use.
Social Equity: Providing uninterrupted access to potentially vital online services in case of a disaster or emergency benefits users.
Guidelines within this specification which the Interest Group has identified possible implications for accessibility, privacy, or security, either by providing protections for end users or which are important for website providers to take in to consideration when implementing features designed to implement digital sustainability, are listed below. This list reflects the current understanding of the Interest Group but other guidelines may have implications that the Interest Group is not aware of at the time of publishing.
Individuals or organizations wishing to understand more about best practices relating to these objectives should read the relevant materials provided by W3C Working and Interest Groups in this area, as the result of good accessibility, privacy, and security, can benefit both people and the planet in measurable ways.
It is relevant to note that groups working on accessibility, privacy, and security may identify sustainability impacts within their work and may provide relevant guidance where appropriate on best practices to limit the scope of these concerns. Any such guidance should be considered as complementary to that provided within the WSG.
A.1 Accessibility
Guidelines within this specification that may relate to accessibility are:
Web accessibility (within the context of inclusive design) means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities (and those without) can use them, free of barriers.
Note
Types of accessibility barriers can include auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual. They can also be permanent, temporary, or situational (depending on the situation).
PPP
Planet, People, and Prosperity (PPP) is a set of principles that recommends considering each of these factors during the sustainability process.
This method of considering both people and the planet (alongside the needs of business) is known under other abbreviations with similar objectives such as Environmental, Social, and (corporate) Governance (ESG), which considers economic factors alongside; there is also Environment, Equity, and Economy (EEE) that follow a similar pattern.
Note
Such work is grounded within the three pillars of sustainability:
Planet: We prioritize the health of the environment, ecosystems, and the planet overall.
People: People should have access to resources, information, and opportunities necessary for their well-being.
Prosperity: Financial stability and equitable economic development—in this case, through the digital economy—ensures shared prosperity for the planet and its inhabitants.
Informative
For information purposes and not required for compliance.
Note
Content identified as "informative" or "non-normative" is never required for compliance.
Aiming for a clean (hosted using carbon-free energy), efficient (using the fewest resources possible), open (accessible and user-controlled data), honest (avoiding misleading or exploiting users), regenerative (support people and the planet), and resilient (function under any circumstances) service or product.
Additional information about participation in the Sustainable Web Interest Group can be found within the GitHub repository of the Interest Group.
C.1 Participants active in the development of this document
Alexander Dawson, Andrea Davanzo, Andrew Wright, Andy Blum, Anne Faubry, Arnaud Levy, Ben Clifford, Berwyn Powell, Brett Tackaberry, Brian Louis Ramirez, Chris Adams, Chris Augier, Chris Butterworth, Chris Needham, Chris Sater, Chris Wilson, Claire Thornewill, Daniel Appelquist, David Jeanmonod, Dennis Lemm, Diogo Abrantes Da Silva, Dom Robinson, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Emily Trotter, Fershad Irani, Francesco Fullone, François Burra, Gaël Duez, Hidde De Vries, Iain McClenaghan, Ian Jacobs, Ines Akrap, Ismael Velasco, Iulia Raluca Ionita, James Christie, Jeffrey Yasskin, Jennifer Strickland, Jens Oliver Meiert, Jim McCool, Josh Kim, Julien Wilhelm, Kazuhito Kidachi, Laurent Devernay Satyagraha, Len Dierickx, Leon Brocard, Łukasz Mastalerz, Marie Ototoi, Michelle Barker, Mike Gifford, Morgan Murrah, Nahuai Badiola, Neil Clark, Nick Doty, Nicola Bonotto, Nick Lewis, Orie Steele, Owen Barton, Owen Rogers, Peter Krautzberger, Philippe Le Hégaret, Romuald Priol, Rose Newell, Rudolf Van Der Berg, Ryan Sholin, Sandy Dähnert, Sarah Zama, Shane Herath, Simon Perdrisat, Susannah Hill, Tantek Çelik, Thibaud Colas, Thorsten Jonas, Tim Frick, Tzviya Siegman, Youen Chéné, Yuna Orsini, Zoe Lopez-Latorre.
C.2 Other active participants, or contributors to supporting resources
Adam Newman, Aiste Rugeviciute, Alekh Gupta, Alicia Pritchett, Alisa Bonsignore, Anthony Vallée-Dubois, Antoine Abélard, Asim Hussain, Bee Flaherty, Boris Schapira, Brian Sharpe, Carine Bournez, Christian H Brown, Christophe Clouzeau, Christos Bacharakis, Crystal Preston-Watson, Danielle Subject, Denis Didier, Edward Bender, Elise West, Eloisa Guerrero, Emma Horrell, Florence Maurice, Gerry McGovern, Greg McDonald, Hannah Smith, Ignacio Rondini, Ivano Malavolta, James Cannings, James Gallagher, Jan Henckens, Jean Rigotti, Jeroen Hulscher, Jon Gibbins, Juan Sotés, Julien Robitaille, Kate Mroczkowski, Katya Dreyer-Oren, Kimi Wei, Laila Tamani, Leah Goldfarb, Lenchi Danch, Loren Velasquez, Louise Towler, Luciene Bulhões Mattos, Luis Tiago, Manfred Jurgovsky, Marie Koesnodihardjo, Mark Butcher, Marketa Benisek, Mert Altinöz, Michelle Sanver, Moritz Guth, Nick Oliveira, Nick Sollecito, Nicolas Lanthemann, Nicholas Oliveira, Nicolas Oren, Oliver Winks, Patrick Hypscher, Pietro Jarre, Radu Micu, Rafael Lebre, Rebecca Brocton, Rick Butterfield, Rick Viscomi, Robin Whittleton, Samuel Pitoňák, Sandra Pallier, Sarven Capadisli, Sebastien Solere, Sylvain Tenier, Thierry Leboucq, Thomas Alexander Munch-Woolff, Tom Greenwood, Tom Howells, Torsten Beyer, Tristan Nitot, Yelle Lieder, Youcef Bekhti.
[#122] Added dark mode capability to the specification and supplements. @AlexDawsonUK
Updates:
None
Fixes:
[#70] & [#117] Global editorial improvements and bug fixes have been applied to the WSG. @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @jenstrickland, @mrchrisadams, & @ryansholin
[#79] & [#119] Intents have been updated, shortened, and turned into guideline subheadings. @airbr, @AlexDawsonUK, Alisa Bonsignore, @andreadavanzo, @codewordcreative, Sarah Zama, @susannah-hill & @TzviyaSiegman
[#89] & [#90] Structure of the crossover links has been improved for accessibility. @jenstrickland, @pkra, @TzviyaSiegman
[#90] Attribution for authors now conforms to pubRules with acknowledgements link. @AlexDawsonUK & @TzviyaSiegman
[#93], [#102], & [#104] Editorial improvements have been provided for the web dev success criteria. @airbr, @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @hidde, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#100] Editorial improvements have been provided for the category introductions. @AlexDawsonUK, @awright1979-alt, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @hidde, @ines-akrap, @jenstrickland, @ryansholin, @susannah-hill, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#101] Editorial improvements have been provided for the UX success criteria. @AlexDawsonUK, @awright1979-alt, @ChrisButterworth, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @jenstrickland, @the-sustainabledev, Sarah Zama, @thorstenjonas, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#105] Editorial improvements have been provided for the hosting success criteria. @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @susannah-hill, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#107] Editorial improvements have been provided for the business success criteria. @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#108] Editorial improvements have been provided for the UX benefits. @awright1979-alt, @codewordcreative, @jenstrickland, Sarah Zama, @thorstenjonas, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#109] Editorial improvements have been provided for the web dev benefits. @codewordcreative, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#110] Editorial improvements have been provided for the hosting benefits. @codewordcreative, @susannah-hill, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#112] & [#118] Broken links and redirects have been resolved or removed. @AlexDawsonUK & @ldevernay
[#113] Editorial improvements have been provided for the business benefits. @codewordcreative, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
[#114] Editorial improvements have been provided for the examples. @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, & @timfrick
[#118] Broken links and redirects have been resolved or removed. @AlexDawsonUK
[#120] Resolved an issue around language use of normative in supporting documents. @frivoal, @hidde, @tantek
[#121] & [#122] Alignment with W3C Principle Notes, Manual of Style, and QA Framework. @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, & @hidde
[#122] Aligned all documents with mandatory pubRules requirements. @AlexDawsonUK
Q2 2025 Release Notes (30th June 2025)
Additions:
[#6] New resources supplement that will serve as the repository for sustainability links. @AlexDawsonUK