Limited Videos and Gifs
One of the biggest sustainable practices is the little to no use of videos on the site. If there were to be any, they would be found embedded in news or blog post updates but not on any main pages. This means that none will be loaded unless you click on one of the posts that included one and then proceed to click the embedded video too.1 The only feature which could take up a larger file size would be the use of an animated logo gif on the website homepage. However, seeing as this is the only use of a gif, only one shouldn’t have much, if any, of an impact on how green the website is. It is a good tradeoff as this is a nice welcome for the viewer compared to a standard image or only text.
1Solve (2023) 8 Tips to Create a Sustainable Website Available Online: https://solve.co.uk/ethical-business/how-to-create-a-sustainable-website [Accessed 29/11/2024]
Essential Information
To make sure there is not an excessive amount of information on pages such as “Events Calendar” and “News and Updates”, these will only show up to a month in the past. For the news, it can keep blog/newspaper style posts but limit image usage as these will be specific to the website. Embedded posts from social media will be deleted after a month as these will still be accessible externally anyway. News blogs and embedded social media posts could also be filtered separately by the user too to allow them to only see whichever one they are wanting to view.
Image Optimization
File sizes of images will be largely reduced as having full quality images would be unnecessary especially because a lot will only be seen if you navigate to a specific page. Some images can be used twice, mainly in slideshows and single images instead of having separate images for both. This will massively reduce the page loading times which will reduce the amount of energy used to load them while also giving the user a more enjoyable experience. If a page took too long to load, it is likely the user would give up waiting and go somewhere else instead.