Make your website more sustainable.

I spent the first fifteen years of my career launching and growing brands across the globe for highprofile businesses like AutoTrader, Carlsberg and Goodwood. It was only after I joined the charity Dementia Support as a Trustee, and upon reviewing my own experiences as a disillusioned senior marketer, that I felt compelled and inspired to take his experience and values to the wider community.

When Jen and I set up Growth Animals at the height of the pandemic, we were inspired by our desire to help businesses grow their bottom line AND positive impact, through marketing that is helpful and inspiring, not manipulative or intrusive.

As the charity’s Trustee with marketing expertise, it was my job to challenge ideas and activities and to offer advice as to how things could be improved. On a particular occasion, the activity at hand was an event, a virtual one no-less, as the pandemic had just kicked in. The discussion around the table turned to how to drum up some additional interest in the event and thus secure some much-needed ticket revenue for the charity.

“How could we engineer an impression of scarcity,” said I, knowing full well that there’s nothing like a bit of ‘Fear Of Missing Out’ to get people to open up their wallets. It was at that moment that the decades of focusing on short-term commercial results came to roost. It was a realisation that I had become too used to the idea of being a servant to owners and faceless shareholders, rather than the customers we were really meant to serve. I was involved with the charity precisely because I wanted to put my skills to good use for a cause and purpose that was wholly devised to benefit people. Yet here I was, doing it a disservice by projecting unethical marketing practices upon it. Now, I may be overdramatising somewhat, by putting my actions in line with some of the big corporate villains of our time, but I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology behind why good people do bad things. A couple of the psychological forces lurking behind my actions no doubt included ‘tunnel vision’ and ‘winner-takes-all competition’. Fundamentally though, what I learnt from this experience, was that if you want to be a ‘6 Star Leader’, you need to get used to spotting, calling out and crucially, creating a culture where ethical marketing is recognised, respected and expected as the benchmark.

Whilst the normality of traditional marketing relies on its power to manipulate people to buy things they generally don’t need, our change of focus meant we began exploring with our clients how to raise their positive sustainability or impact-based stories, both as a means to appeal to customers for whom this is an increasingly important motivation and as a way to educate people in simple steps to make positive and sometimes alternative choices in their lives.

Which brings me to the subject of ‘sustainable web designs…I knew that, once we’ve cleaned up our supply chain, we’ve taken steps to reduce your company travel, and maybe we have even gone paperless, we still all have to deal with the dreaded curse of the digital carbon footprint (the energy consumption of the internet is now estimated to be greater than that of the whole United Kingdom and overtaking that of the global airline industry). But what can we all do to ensure our websites are not part of the problem?

Here are a few ideas to help with faster (and speed here is key – the quicker it loads, the less energy it uses), better and cleaner websites:

1. Measure - The first step is to understand your site’s current carbon footprint. Website Carbon is one of the original carbon calculators and will highlight your present position.

2. Videos - Turn off auto-playing videos (never mind the fact that they can be irritating and intrusive), reduce the size and length of videos and use them more sparingly across your site.

3. Images - Reduce the size and quantity of your imagesless is often better. Consider if your message could be better conveyed through clever use of copy or graphics.

4. Old Pages - Reduce the bloat of your site by removing old or unnecessary pages. Consider combining pages to condense the message and reduce your site’s page count.

5. Hosting - Change your hosting platform to one of the many that are now powered by renewable energy. This simple change alone could reduce your carbon footprint by 10%.

Implementing these 5 simple steps can have a dramatic impact on the reduction of your website’s carbon footprint, often without the need for a full rebuild. And for those looking to take it further, there’s plenty more that can be done to further reduce your site’s impact, through areas such as the optimisation of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation), UX/UI (User Experience & User Interface), Fonts and Clean Coding.