Tribe Zero-waste:
creating a low digital carbon website for a zero waste refill shop

We use a green hosting provider

Data centres that store, process and deliver websites’ information on their servers are usually part of an enormous facility requiring a huge amount of energy. One of the most important ways to minimise digital carbon emissions was to make sure we were using a green hosting provider that would offset carbon emissions or even better use renewable energy.  A list of green hosting providers can be found at The Green Web Foundation.

We limited the use of photos

Photo sizes can have one of the biggest impacts on the size of a page and therefore the levels of carbon emissions it produces.  We used photos sparingly where we thought it would add value for the user, showcasing the shop and its products.  We optimised all images so they were as small as possible and saved in a small format.

We used icons instead

Icons are much smaller file sizes than photos. Wherever possible we chose to use icons instead of photos to enhance usability and highlight content.

We thought about colour

Colour can have an impact on the amount of energy your screen uses. White uses the most energy and black uses the least. Tribe Zero-waste’s brand colour is a light grey so we were able to use this as a background on many pages.

We limited fonts

Fonts can also add weight to a page. The Tribe Zero-waste website uses just 2 font types – regular and bold – that are optimised, hosted locally and preloaded to speed up the loading of a page.

We focused on the user experience

By prioritising content, removing unnecessary information and thinking about what problem each piece of content can solve for the customer, we were able to limit the amount of content on each page, and therefore reducing the page size.

We wanted easy navigation and accessibility

Building a good navigation structure will not only help customers find information faster, reducing the amount of energy needed, but will also help Tribe-Zero Waste rank higher in search engines. We made sure the menu was simple and intuitive, adding search and filter options for finding products. Pages were titled and described intuitively to help pages rank well and all photos and icons had descriptive text for screenreaders.

We started from scratch

By building Tribe Zero-waste’s website from scratch we were able to choose content and pages that we really wanted, instead of copying over content from the existing website. This is a great opportunity to audit your website’s content, media and data that you may no longer need.

We designed for mobile layouts

50% of Tribe Zero-waste’s users viewed the current website on a mobile device so it was really important to make sure the layout worked as well on a mobile as it did on a larger screen size.

Other technical bits

Other steps we took to help reduce CO2 emissions were to minimise code, use the latest software versions, enable caching, use a clean, light layout and limit any additional plugins by using customised code instead.

How we compromised and limitations

It was important to balance the user experience with reducing CO2 emissions. For example, allowing users to be able to add products straight to the shopping cart adds additional scripts which makes the pages heavier, but makes it easier for the customer to carry out a task.

We built the website using a framework and builder that would make it easy for Katie to update the website herself if she wanted to and kept the build of the website within budget. A completely bespoke website would be even lighter.

A super light website would use no images at all but customers rely on seeing what a product looks like and we wanted the website to reflect Tribe Zero-waste’s brand colours, style and look interesting to the user.