Eco-Friendliness in the CMS World

Lasse Fredslund is Product Owner at Umbraco and a CMS Critic Contributor. 

“The Cloud is on the ground,” says digital sustainability expert and author, Gerry McGovern. A strange statement, yes, but then it’s supposed to make us stop and think. Right now, we all need to stop and think about how we can each do our bit to prevent global warming.

In a recent webinar, Gerry reminded us that, far from being ethereal, "The Cloud’ is a physical infrastructure with a heavy impact on the planet. He shared the sobering fact that the Cloud runs on 70 million servers and that these servers consume vast amounts of electricity to store Zettabytes of data. The European Commission estimates that digital technologies account for between 5% to 9% of global electricity consumption.

Wasted energy

Gerry points out that, in spite of the environmental damage done to mine metals and manufacture servers, just a fraction of the stored data is actually used. “90% of data is not used 90 days after it is stored,” he informs us. Yet this unused data sits on servers that are being continuously powered and cooled, consuming up to 416.2TWh electricity per year and emitting CO2. That’s unsustainable.

Why we need to act now

Four years ago, Professor Mike Berners-Lee, younger brother of the inventor of the World Wide Web, and his Lancaster University colleague, Mike Hazas, calculated that the internet, and the infrastructure and devices that operate and consume digital services, account for 3.7% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. That’s the equivalent impact of the aviation industry. This figure was expected to double by 2025 as more services became digitized and didn’t factor in the impact of generative AI services, such as ChatGPT.

If we’re still running our websites and digital experiences on data centers powered by fossil fuels, then we’re part of that problem. However, as web developers and editors, we can make multiple positive changes to collectively reduce our impact. These include actively reducing the data weight of web pages, regularly deleting unused web content, and educating clients about the benefits of making these changes. Read on to find out how.

The Business Argument for Going Green

Gartner has included sustainable technology among its Top Strategic Technology Trends for 2024 and has predicted that, by 2027, 25% of a CIO’s compensation will be linked to their sustainable technology impact. This is because CIOs are in a position to technically evaluate different suppliers, and technologies, while also building the business case for implementing the necessary changes to make operations more sustainable.

Let’s look at the business benefits:

Higher Engagement

The good news is that the drive to make websites more sustainable makes them more efficient.

Efficient websites often load faster and increase web conversion rates, which aligns with business goals.

As more consumers opt to spend their money with environmentally-friendly brands, having a carbon-conscious website makes the right first impression with customers, employees, and investors.

Our digital agency partners have also discovered that implementing eco-friendly web design practices can halve page load speeds, which tends to encourage web visitors to stick around and engage with your brand.

Lowered TCO

A number of our digital agency partners are also finding that carbon-conscious web design has reduced TCO for their clients.

Novicell UK CTO, Mikkel Keller Stubkjær, recently shared how his agency took a sustainable approach to building a new website for New York consultancy, AlixPartners, which contains more than 1,400 articles and insights. By taking a true headless approach, where multiple CMSs feed their content into a digital experience orchestration platform (DXO), in this case Enterspeed, AlixPartners can make use of pre-prepared content, so that the website is fully functional, even when the CMSs are down for maintenance. Mikkel reports that the new site is “Blazingly fast and true headless results in lower TCO”.

Enhanced Reputation

Kirstie Buchanan, Growth and Partnerships Director at CTI Digital, points to new accreditation frameworks which allow businesses to demonstrate their efforts to become more sustainable. She advises that ITIL® certifications enable organizations to demonstrate their commitment and competence in sustainable practices. Kirstie also believes that the rigorous B-Corps application process helps to place sustainability at an organization’s core. Doing so tends to generate positive changes in an organization’s culture, which enhance its reputation with customers, partners and investors.

Legal compliance

In October 2023, the California state governor signed three bills requiring more than 10,000 public and private US companies to report on their greenhouse gas emissions; their climate-related financial risk; and thirdly to disclose information about their use of carbon offsets.

The first two requirements are in line with the GHG Protocol and TCFD contained in the Securities and Exchange Commission’s (SEC) climate disclosure proposals; and the IFRS® Sustainability Disclosure Standards, as well as the European Sustainability Reporting Standards.

Large US corporations with subsidiaries operating in Europe are also likely to be in scope to comply with the EU Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive (CSRD). The directive has been in effect since June 2023 and EU member states have until July 2024 to adopt CSRD into national law. The aim of EU CSRD is to drive change in the business behavior of companies that operate in the European Union.

It is anticipated that 50,000 organizations will be in scope to comply with EU CSRD. Companies in their value chain will need to make positive changes too. As a result, our digital agency partners are seeing a growing number of RFPs that require suppliers to demonstrate sustainable business practices.

How can the CMS industry help?

We recognize that as a CMS vendor we have a responsibility to include sustainability as a stakeholder in product development. In our case, this means considering CO2 impacts when setting defaults, and keeping software updated using frameworks that maximize efficiency. As an example, owing to Microsoft’s efforts to achieve carbon neutrality, websites that have been migrated to the new .NET versions of Umbraco became at least 50% more efficient, leading to a significant reduction in CO2 emissions.

In preparation for its first Impact Report, Umbraco began calculating its carbon footprint in 2022 and now has a tool and methodology to identify the greatest emission sources. We now know that hosting Umbraco Cloud and Heartcore projects represents more than 50% of Umbraco’s estimated 1,100 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide Equivalent.

Last March we formed our community Sustainability Team, comprising web engineers and business leaders from digital agencies, who are working together to promote awareness among their peers and clients of best practices for designing low-carbon websites. Some of their expert tips and case studies are shared below.

How are the experts achieving sustainable websites?

In its most simple form, sustainable behavior is about minimizing waste and making the most of resources. So how can we do that when designing websites and digital experiences?

During a recent webinar, Neil Clark, Service Design Lead at digital agency, TPX Impact, noted that reducing the data weight of websites should be our first step. “Since the Paris agreement, the average web page size has increased by 73% on desktop and 148% on mobile. Software is unnecessarily heavy. Internet traffic has increased by 600%.” He advises that, when taking on a client brief, “We must start to view data transfer as a constraint and the planet as a stakeholder. Set a page weight budget and stick to it and use tools to monitor.”

Which tools can you use to reduce CO2e?

WebsiteCarbon.com, developed by Wholegrain Digital, is the original website CO2 calculator and provides a simple first step to demonstrate to decision-makers how an organization’s digital impact can be reduced.

As part of its mission to reach a fossil-free internet by 2030, Green Web Foundation provides a number of free open-source tools, such as CO2.js, allowing organizations to see how much CO2 is associated with each web page. Thomas Morris Technical Lead at digital agency, TPX Impact, and Rick Butterfield, development team lead at Nexer Digital, recently released a free tool based on CO2.js which allows editors to check the CO2 emitted from Umbraco sites, so that they can reduce data weight and optimize efficiency.

Green Web Foundation also offers a free plug-in for Google’s Lighthouse web app testing tool, allowing developers to test for carbon emissions in the same way that they test for SEO, accessibility, and performance.

Ecograder, built on Google’s Lighthouse, is another popular free tool for testing the page weight, CO2 emissions, and accessibility scores of websites.  

At the more advanced end of the spectrum, Rick Butterfield describes how developers can use open-source tools to build carbon-aware websites for clients. “The Green Software Foundation has come out with a Carbon Aware software development kit that allows developers to create software that does more when the electricity is from renewable sources and less when the electricity is from fossil fuels. Open APIs allow us to create this type of service for clients. Functionality of the site can be altered based on current grid usage, where your servers are located, or where your users are. As an example, images can be disabled if the server load is too high, or they could be stripped back to display illustrations instead.”

Neil Clark is part of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) community group of more than 100 developers from 20 countries, who are currently drafting Web Sustainability Guidelines to help share best practice with fellow web developers around the world. “It goes across four pillars: user experience, website development, hosting infrastructure and product management,.” he explains.

How to lose weight

Pictures and videos increase the amount of data traffic transferred from servers to user devices.

Using compression settings to full effect can reduce image weight by between 50% to 80%, without changing the user experience. 

Thomas Morris advises using newer image compression formats, which can reduce a 1Mb JPEG to a 363kb Webp file, or a 294Kb AVIF image file. “A useful first step on your sustainability journey is to set page weight budgets and stick to them. This helps to create a culture of optimization with realistic targets. The HTTP Archive suggests a maximum of 1 Megabyte.”

Even the colors selected can make a difference to the energy consumed on a users’ device. Research presented by Google at the Android Dev Summit in 2018 showed that, on newer OLED screens, green hues use 580mW at full brightness, red uses 600mW, and blue consumes 800mW. A completely white screen at full screen brightness uses 6 times the power of a black screen. Designing websites that default to dark mode is the more sustainable choice.

Use standard fonts. If you have to use custom fonts, reduce them down to the most commonly-used characters. One of our partners used this approach to reduce a client’s custom font weight from 95 Kilobytes to 16Kb, saving 83%.  Thomas Morris also recommends using WOFF2 font compression.

Minimising text assets, including HTML documents, JavaScript files and CSS files is a really good practice. Google’s Brotli lossless compression tool reduces text-based files by around two thirds and is supported by 96% of browsers and can work with a fallback to Gzip for the remaining 4%.

Select sustainable architecture

In addition to optimizing images and using standard fonts, it is advisable to also make use of a content delivery network (CDN) and apply lazy loading. Many of our partners also recommend JAMStack architecture, where Javascript, APIs and Markup are used to decouple a website’s backend from its frontend so that pre-rendered static files can be stored on a CDN, making sites more efficient and easier to maintain. From the users’ perspective, they also load faster.

James Hobbs, Head of Engineering at digital agency, Great State, advocates selecting backend technologies that optimize sites and reduce energy consumption, stating, “.Net Core keeps libraries up to date. Design patterns, like Circuit Breaker, protect systems from wasteful behaviors. Consider using technologies, such as GraphQL, to fetch only what is needed. Keep API interactions lean, round trips between server and client device take time. Using JAMStack makes a site very fast for your users and also reduces the load on backend systems.”

Andy Eva-Dale, Technical Director at digital agency, Tangent, took a JAMStack approach when migrating UK Power Networks (UKPN) from a monolithic website to a cloud-based, composable platform. Tangent’s carbon-conscious web design reduced the impact of visits to the UKPN home page from 1.44g CO2 per visit down to 0.20g. In addition, page load speeds were halved and operational costs were reduced by 66%. Tangent has provided UKPN with a site that scales to serve millions of consumers and improves user experience, while measurably reducing the site’s environmental impact.

Educating consumers

While web designers can make a big difference to lowering data weight and selecting sustainable architecture, a lot of the impact still lies in the hands of consumers. This is because the energy consumption of a typical digital service can be roughly divided into 20% used by the server, 20% spent transferring data between the server and client devices, and 60% of energy consumed on the client device.

Digital agency, Kruso, took a carbon-conscious approach to designing the website of Danish local council, Herning Kommune, allowing users to select a low-carbon interface. With one click, all pictures and videos are removed and colors are muted, reducing energy consumption and CO2 emissions by up to 70% across the site. However, it’s still up to users whether or not they select eco mode, so education still plays a vital part in making our digital lives more sustainable. Perhaps the most compelling way is to communicate the cost and convenience of taking more sustainable actions. Messages such as ‘auto-play shortens your battery’s day’ and ‘deleting dials down data costs,’ may resonate more successfully with end-users.

Conclusion

The past two decades have included the ten warmest years on record. To stay below the 1.5°C global warming threshold, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change advises that global greenhouse gas emissions need to decrease by 7% a year to 2030 and stop completely by 2050. The time to act is now.

As Neil Clark has commented, “If we as an industry get behind a single set of W3C standards and demand transparency from organizations around the supply chain of the internet, and if this gets tied to legislation, this will force a big change where we start to improve the internet in general. We need to start embedding these practices now so that the transition is easier when W3C sustainability becomes the de facto set of guidelines.”

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