 Thank you. So, good morning. I'm Louise Tower, founder of Indigo Tree. I've got three decades of experience in software and website development, and I'm really driven by a passion for the very best combination of technology, sustainability and business excellence. Last year I was delighted to be named by Innovate UK as one of their Women in Innovation Award winners. So, did you know if the internet was a country, it'd be the fourth largest polluter? This is from a study in 2021, and it's something we should all be helping to change. In this talk I'm going to start with an introduction to the legal and commercial reasons why all organisations should be thinking about digital sustainability and the carbon footprint of their IT and their websites. Then I'm going to go through the various stages when creating a website, and as part of this I've got ten actions to share with you today. Finally, I'll summarise the commercial benefits of why you should all be starting now. So first, why? What's been going on? Well, in December 2015 196 countries came together with the United Nations and signed the Paris Agreement. This was the first global unbinding climate treaty to try and keep the global rising temperature to two degrees compared to pre-industrial levels, and ideally 1.5 degrees. Since then they've held an annual conference of the parties, COP, in this year, later this year it's being held in Dubai, for everyone involved who's a signatory to that agreement, and at these meetings each member's progress is reviewed and assessed. But quite frankly we're not doing enough. So later this year Europe is bringing in new border import taxes for certain goods, the really sort of what you call industrial dirty goods, very carbon intensive in their manufacturing, at great risk of carbon leakage, things like cement and iron and steel and aluminium and fertilisers. And they're bringing in these import taxes for those things, but there are plans in place to widen the scope of this to more imports over the next few years. So although most people, if not all of you in the room, won't be infected by these specific taxes, it's likely that your organisation or some of your clients may well be in the future. In the UK we were the first country to make it a legal duty to meet the requirements of the Paris Agreement. It's in law that our government has to do it. Our government's not just wanting to reduce emissions, they also have targets to reduce demand as well. At the moment only very large organisations have mandatory reporting requirements in the UK. But this will trickle down to small and medium-sized businesses before the end of this decade. I can quite envisage by the end of the decade as well as doing my annual tax return reporting my turnover and my profits, I might well be having to do a carbon return as well. When you hear people talking about reporting, they'll often mention scope one, two and three emissions. This comes from some standards called the greenhouse gas protocol. The diagram here shows all the greenhouse gases. It's not just carbon dioxide, there's methane and refrigerants that contribute to climate change as well. And the emissions from our activity are split into three scopes for reporting reasons. Scope one is your direct consumption of fuel oil and gas. It's things like company cars and your gas heating and the actual consumption of the things that are polluting the environment. And we can normally measure this because if you have a company car, you'll know how much petrol you're buying or how much diesel you're buying. Scope two is your indirect emissions. For example, when you buy your electricity. And again, it's fairly straightforward to measure because if you're like me and you have a small office, you'll have an electricity bill. You'll know how many kilowatt hours of electricity that you've used. Scope three, this is the really tricky bit. And for some organisations, it can be the vast majority of their emissions. I saw an article a couple of days ago, and I see have started measuring their emissions. 99% of their emissions are scope three emissions. For an average business, it's way over 80% unless you're a manufacturing business. And this is where your IT and your website fits. Upstream is all the things you have to purchase and do and pre-process. Sort of cradle to gate to make the thing that you sell. And then downstream is the distribution storage. And it also includes the carbon footprint whilst your product and service is being used. So if you have a website, it's all your clients' websites if you're an agency like us. That is included in our scope three. And then it's the end of life. What does it take to decommission that thing? So this is all very theoretical and it's all very well talking about laws and standards. But what about commercial drivers? Businesses are actually not waiting for governments at this point. In the UK, the advertising standards authority and the committee for advertising practice have recently updated their guidance to try and clear up some of the confusion over sustainability claims. Especially around the use of terms like carbon neutral and net zero because there's been a real backlash against consumers with a lack of trust and greenwashing. So if you're going to make those sorts of claims, you now have to supply evidence to support those green claims. You can't just say that you're carbon neutral. You have to actually show that you are by measuring it and then offsetting it. And environmental, social and governance strategy is going to become more and more crucial for finance. Especially with access to finance if you're a larger organisation. Why would I lend you money if your operations are not going to be sustainable in 5, 10 or 15 years time? It's just not a good bet. Investors now are looking for answers when considering investing for the longer term and certainly some of the pension funds and people like that are starting to have that as part of their questions that they're asking before they will invest. And then there's where you fit in the supply chain. I attended a meet up a couple of weeks ago held at UBS Bank in central London. They're a global bank. They have a sustainability guild with some volunteers working on reducing their carbon footprint for IT across their operations. And ESG is a real priority for them and they're really genuinely trying. But more urgently than all the little things people are trying to do, the traders and their finance people and the people who are selling their services are starting to get real questions and pressure from clients on the specific results that all these great things they're doing actually are and see the measured reduction and reporting in place. The ESG manager in the UK is literally getting questions about it from people who aren't willing to work with them unless they can answer those questions. And companies are not waiting for the governments in regulation. Tesco, again I'm basically they're a UK company but they're one of the world's largest retailers. They have more than 6,000 outlets across Europe and Asia. Millions of customers every week. In October 2021 they sent a letter to all of their suppliers. If you want to continue to be a supplier to Tesco you must do these four things now. Our national health service in the UK is also not actually even waiting for our government. From April this year all contracts above 5 million, the NHS expects suppliers to publish a carbon reduction plan for their scope one, two emissions and some of their scope threes. From April 2024 it will cover all procurement of any value. If you want to supply the NHS you have to have a carbon reduction plan. From April 2027 it will cover all scope three emissions. And from April 2028 all individual products supplied to the NHS will be expected to have their carbon footprint calculated. And that includes websites and software and digital services. There's a massive amount of work to do to meet those mandatory requirements. So where on earth do you start with your IT and your website? Well you can't manage what you can't measure. So everything starts with a plan. Talk to your clients, talk to your internal stakeholders so they understand why you're making choices as you build or adapt the website that you're working on. My first piece of advice is to start with education. As what we've found when we're talking to our clients is that many people simply do not realise that their website even has a carbon footprint. They don't think about the fact that electricity is produced from fuel which can emit greenhouse gases. When a user requests a web page the hosting server returns data to their browser. When you send an email this takes electricity. The electricity is at the data centre, it's through the wires. It's on the device that you're looking at the page on. So actually one of the things you can do is think about how you can reduce the amount of data sent as this will reduce the amount of electricity required. A new website project normally starts with some design. An accessible site tends to use a bit less data as you tend to have smaller images and text isn't embedded in images. So one of the things we try and always do is make the site accessible make sure it's as text rich as possible. But think about why do you need all those images, videos and fonts? Do you really need all of them? Are they serving a good purpose? And design your emails really carefully? Do they need loads of images? So my action number two is to optimise your images. Now if you're here today as a designer or developer and you've heard of things like core web vitals this won't be a new thing for you. There are some great WordPress plug-ins you can use to help with image optimisation. We often use things like Tiny PNG. We serve images on WebP. You can use the new WordPress performance plug-in to help. You can use a CDN such as Cloudflare. You can make sure you're sizing and scaling your images in your theme from the media library. So even if you load up a really large image into your media library it's saving out all the different sizes that are required for the different breakpoints so you're not on your mobile phone serving that really large image or serving one that's the right size for the device. You can also lazy load your images so that when you first come onto the page images aren't loaded if they're not in the viewport. If a user doesn't scroll down the page those images won't be loaded. And don't pull in things like third-party icon libraries just because you need one social media icon in the footer of your website. Just use an SVG file. For Action 3 I recommend reviewing how you use video in your design. Really, really try to persuade your client or stakeholder not to have a video or to playing in the banner right at the top of the page. If they insist can you turn it off for mobile and replace with an image appropriately sized and optimised of course. Most browsers don't ought to play videos embedded on a page now anyway. But if you're adding video directly use the poster attribute to put an image in front of it and at that point the video will only be downloaded when the poster is actually clicked on and the same if you're adding a video via YouTube or Vimeo for example make sure you have a facade image in place and there are plugins that can help with that. Only when the image is clicked will the video download so if nobody clicks the image they won't be downloading that extra data. And if the video is not part of the initial viewport as the page is loaded you can lazy load those facade images as well. My next action is for fonts. Now I appreciate the fact that if you're a designer in the room it might be a bit controversial but do you really need four fonts in five weights in different styles? Can you turn off the variations of the fonts and the subsetting if the site isn't multilingual? Can you just literally limit it to the characters that you need to deliver the site? We often design really lovely websites with maybe one or two fonts and a couple of weights and styles. You don't have to compromise, you just have to think about it and then self-host the font files as part of your theme because then you can cache things. And again there's WordPress plugins that can help with this and check the formats Woof 2. Being a bit geeky it uses Brotli compression which is about 30% better than the previous version. Google on their web.dev website has a really, really great article to help with this. It's really straightforward to actually make quite a significant difference if you work on the fonts that you're using on the pages of your website. And action number five is think about your email especially if you're running a transactional website with things like WooCommerce you're sending out a lot of transactional emails to your customers. It's quite tricky to calculate the carbon footprint of an email. According to the Carbon Literacy Trust an average email has a carbon footprint between 0.3 of a gram if it's just a text spammy email and then it can be up to 26 grams if you'll send out an email marketing blast to 100 people. But my advice is think about really consider whether you need images in your email and if you do how large they need to be. Can you get away with a plain text email because actually you might also get better deliverability as well. It'll get through the spam checkers a bit better. So what can you do when you're developing your website? Well if you're going to start with an existing theme choose wisely. On a simple brochure or lead generation site you do need not need an all singing all dancing theme compatible with every possible e-commerce event and form plug-in on the planet. All that extra code that's included by the theme author to make those plug-ins look really great adds data as you're using the theme. You can in some themes turn that sort of stuff off but it can be quite tricky and time consuming to do. If you have the skills and budget I believe it's better to build the theme yourself. You have a lot more control to optimise your code and you only include what you need. So my action number six is to look at the code loaded for each of your pages or templates. We all use WordPress plug-ins to add features but if your Google map is only on your contact page don't load the Google Maps API on every single page on your website or replace the map with an image linking out to the Google Maps because actually for your visitors that will be perfectly fine. The same goes for your inquiry forms. If you don't have a form on every page why have the form plug-in loading all the code? There are WordPress plug-ins such as Perfmatters that we use with our clients to customise what scripts and files are loaded on each specific page. It's really easy to exclude scripts for all pages but the ones that are really needed. It's a great way of improving the performance of your site and don't forget to implement caching so assets aren't downloaded more than once as visitors browse through your website. My seventh action is to help your developers and engineers write a sustainable code. The Green Software Foundation has a free course which you can incorporate into your education and training and your KPIs and the Linux Foundation offers this course with an examiner certificate. It's a really interesting course. It doesn't take very long to do and it gives you a great grounding on what all the basic concepts are around sustainable code and software and applications. So you've built your shiny new website but have you considered where it's going to be hosted? The data centre you choose makes a really big difference to the overall carbon footprint of your website. My foundation again has a great tool for checking if your hosting is using green energy to run the data centre. We host with WP Engine and use Cloudflare as a CDN so I'm confident we're in a great place with our website. You can just go and check what's the score. My next action may not be relevant to everyone here but sometimes websites and software applications are processing batch jobs often overnight or at regular intervals. Think about the timing of these. They may not be affecting the end user of your website but still require processing power on your server. As some background here if you're connected to the power grid you can't control what sources supply your electricity. It varies by location. Some countries have more renewables than others. It also changes over the time of year. A windy sunny day is great for renewable energy sources in the UK. A cloudy day not so good. By the time of day as energy demand fluctuates especially in the early evening it can really spike. We use the national grid carbon intensity calculator and their API to look at when the energy is cleanest. What time is another useful resource with an API? Can you build something into your code to actually affect the timing of those jobs? Even 15 minutes or half an hour can make quite a big difference. So you've launched your website on green hosting and it's designed and built to use less data and have a lower carbon footprint. Then what? Well often at this point the website is handed over to content editors and marketing teams. They may decide to replace that static image used so carefully optimised that they can choose the size of the image in the block editor that they've uploaded to the media library. They may not appreciate why it's taking a few seconds for that page to load. They could be planning an amazing marketing campaign and because you've built your shiny new site in the block editor it's really simple for them to create a great landing page but have they checked the size of their new page when they're planning their campaign where hundreds or even thousands of people will be clicking on that viral link or advert. So my final piece of advice is to continuously monitor your site and identify areas where you can make further improvements. Check where those improvements will have the greatest impact on the carbon footprint of the site and you could even set a carbon budget with your team. So the result of all your hard work and benefits to your client and organisation well if you start to act on some of these things and reduce the carbon footprint of your website then it will be faster and each page will have a lower carbon footprint per visit and that's great news for your visitors and customers. In the UK we have a lot of people on fixed and limited data plans if your website uses less data it will cost them less money to visit your site. We work with some schools in deprived areas and they're always interested in the link between data and cost to parents to access the school website that their children go to on their mobile phone. We actually had an instance during Covid where one of our clients wanted that big video on the banner on their homepage we explained the impact that would have and they made a very conscious decision to go with a static image of the amount of data that the parents of children at their school would have to be downloading and using on their mobile phone when they visited the site. And if you have a global market then reducing this data makes the site faster on 3G and low feature phones do not assume all of your website visitors have the latest phone and a 5G connection. Being a sustainable business helps you to connect with your customers increasing profits and creating a clear commitment to reducing your carbon footprint often means a greater efficiency as you find ways to improve your operations internal processes across your organisation. Setting targets, looking at your suppliers identifying improvements creates a culture, it gets employees excited about innovation and can actually improve employee engagement and satisfaction as well. And finally, clear commitments and measurement lowers the risk and gives investors confidence but more important than the legislation and the commercial reasons of the moral ones. In total the global north is responsible for 92% of excess global carbon emissions from the overuse of fossil fuels so we actually have a critical role to play. No single action will stop climate change but we should all play a part. I'm Louise Tawlar, the founder of WordPress Agency in Digo Tree. Thank you for listening. There's a lot to do here and I'd love to connect with all of you in the audience if you've enjoyed this talk. Canopy is as soon to be launched WordPress extension to help you continuously measure the carbon footprint of your website. So come and find me if you'd like to find out some more. Thank you. That was amazing. Very educating. Do we have any questions for Louise? Stond into silence. There's so many. Right here. You got mics? Here we come. I will have a question around the communication with your clients before you even start a project. So obviously while you're doing it you can educate them but I've often found that when talking to potential clients some of them don't understand the importance of the green website. They sort of want a website with all bells and whistles and they think it's going to compromise on design or quality and obviously you can assure them otherwise but they don't want to pay an extra budget or anything because they say it must cost more money because it takes more time. I just want to do it quick as possible. How would you have that conversation with them to obviously convince them that it is in their best interest to do that because most of the time we don't seem to have clients that are that interested and see the importance of it? I talk about core web vitals because whether or not they give us stuff about the planet they're going to care about whether they're in Google. So if you make the website fast all other things being equal hopefully that will help with your Google rankings and then at that point the commercial drivers are the fact that they'll get better conversions they won't have people sitting on their mobile phone losing the will to live waiting for the website to load and I'd find some stats about performance and speed and talk about it from a conversion and profit perspective and not worry about the planet but feel good about the fact that you're helping the planet as well along the way and then when they do need to do their mandatory carbon reporting you can be there to say hey actually we can help you with that too and by the way you've already got quite a low carbon website because I think that obviously most people talk about the core web vitals and the performance and they would usually respond with shouldn't a website agency be concentrating on that anyway and so obviously if you're an agency who does practice sustainable web design and that's one of your core values then obviously you're going to be doing that in all your messaging and I just want to try and work out how yes we can talk about it from a performance perspective but like you said every business likes performance but I would love to obviously like you've been educating everyone on the importance of what it does to environment that's the messaging I'm trying to try to get through to them and obviously we can convince them about performance but how do we convince them about the impact on the environment and I guess it's just trying to bridge that gap and get them to understand it I think it is about educating the content editors we did some we did 12 one hour interviews with content editors of our clients and most of them didn't have a Scooby-Doo about accessibility or sustainability and didn't actually consider it when they were editing a website if you're a busy marketing content editor you've got that blog post to publish and then you've got to get on with your busy day managing your campaigns, doing your social media so actually I think it's an education piece and especially depending on what generation they are realistically especially the youngsters they do care they have some intrinsic motivation so it is about education because it doesn't actually cost any more money to build a fast website than a slow website if you start with a plan and you explain why in my opinion you just have to actually start right from the beginning and I wouldn't give them a choice quite frankly we don't give our choice to our clients about building a double accessible website, they get it whether they like it or not unless they get a bit funny about their colours and colour contrast Any other questions? We've got one at the top right over there What kind of tools or methodologies do you use for evaluating the current carbon impact of your website or your business? The Green Software Foundation has some really interesting calculators There's a website carbon calculator that you can just go on and it will literally you can put in the URL and it will tell you a number of grams of CO2 for this particular page being served and then obviously as I say we're launching Canopy which will actually help do the continuous measurement but if you want to just get a view of it look at the pages that get the most traffic and go and measure it at the individual page level and work out which pages and then use things like core web vitals because actually and I think GT metrics is quite good because that will give you the actual amount of kilobytes that the page is loading web page test have started to do some stuff they've got a new reporting tool to measure the number of grams of CO2 for a particular page for a visit there's lots of things out there that can help but you've got to do a little bit of work at the moment to actually measure it overall for a website but actually for a website is all about individual pages in the end and sort of looking at when you make changes what the impact is Next question What have you found, Louise when you're addressing and doing auditing of sites what do you find is the most easily available but neglected? Videos and images and a little bit of fonts and then actually genuinely looking at what's loaded on each page making sure that what's rendered on the page for the first viewport you're just trying to keep it as low as possible because not everybody will scroll down and then you'll reduce it but it's tricky it's geeky and it's a bit technical but I love that so that's why I took my straight Any questions? You guys are quiet Well, okay then I guess that wraps up our second session of the morning Everybody give Louise a big round of applause again Thank you