Medium impact πΏ
Search engines and social networks make use of the content within a website, by ensuring that your metadata is correctly marked up, you can reduce emissions by improving way-finding.
Include the required title element, plus any optional HTML head elements (such as link).
Include necessary meta tag references that search engines and social networks recognize, using a recognized name scheme such as Dublin Core Metadata Initiative (DCMI), Friend Of A Friend (FOAF), or RDFa.
Embed Microdata, Structured Data (Schema), or Microformats within your pages.
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Medium impact πΏ
Sustainability benefits can be generated in numerous ways, by making sure that your website adheres to the requests made by a browser for specific conditions to be taken into account (such as CSS media and preference queries), you can unlock benefits for the visitor, and as a by-product reduce your emissions. It's worth noting that the introduction of user preferences and APIs has increased the risk of visitor fingerprinting and privacy issues.
Apply the monochrome, prefers-contrast, prefers-color-scheme, prefers-reduced-data, and prefers-reduced-motion CSS preference queries if they will benefit your website or application. Also consider the print & scripting CSS media queries if they will improve the sustainability of your website.
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Medium impact πΏ
Visitors approach our products and services on a wide variety of devices these days. Ensuring that your device works on the widest range of devices and differing screen resolutions ensures that you will have a compatible website or application. As such, visitors can actively choose to browse on devices which emit less carbon if they wish.
Allow a website or app to work on mobile devices primarily (testing with various connection speeds), expanding to accommodate larger displays thereafter (mobile-first). It is much more effective to do the hard work to ensure that it works well on a mobile device and then scale it up to larger interfaces.
Utilize progressive enhancement and responsive web design to ensure that your work accommodates a device's capabilities, different screen sizes, and will not fail if it meets an unsupported technology.
To maximize the use of renewable energy, adapt your website or service to electricity availability using carbon-aware design techniques.
Consider supporting other indirect methods of interaction such as voice (speech), code (QR, etc), reader view (browser, application, or RSS), or connected-technology (watch, appliance, transport, etc).
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High impact πΏ
When new best practices or if beneficial scripting guidance exists which will improve the visitor experience, following it should be of the highest priority (only using scripts ethically should be promoted).
Improve sustainability through accessible and performant code implementations.
When using an API, make sure you only call it when necessary. On the other side, make sure no unrequired data is sent by the API.
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Medium impact πΏ
The dangers of scripting are well known, and vulnerabilities are discovered with increasing regularity. As such, it's of ethical benefit for authors to ensure all code used regularly passes security processes.
Check the code for vulnerabilities, exploits, header issues, and code injection.
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Medium impact πΏ
While JavaScript may not cause the most website bloat, it can cause very high emissions in terms of CPU load due to the rendering process, thereby it makes sense to consider the use of dependencies and third-party code carefully.
Prevent developers from downloading and installing JavaScript libraries to run locally (client-side) when they are not needed by checking for unused dependencies and uninstalling those that aren't needed and removing them from your package.json file.
Reduce the amount of JavaScript that has to be downloaded and parsed by the browser by only using libraries where necessary. Consider whether you can use a native JavaScript API instead. Check the package size using a tool like Bundlephobia, and whether individual modules can be installed and imported rather than the whole library.
Regularly check dependencies and keep them up-to-date.
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Low impact πΏ
Search engines and browsers regularly examine websites, requesting specific files by default (they expect them to exist). If the files don't exist, this will lead to potential errors and emissions being caused when they could be created, especially as the files offer SEO, user-experience, and other benefits to visitors.
Take advantage of the favicon.ico, robots.txt, opensearch.xml, site.webmanifest, and sitemap.xml documents.
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Low impact πΏ
There are several small assets which can be included within a website, conferring a range of benefits upon the website or application that utilizes them. They each have a low carbon footprint, so while they do create emissions, it's worth including them for the benefits they provide.
Utilize standards such as ads.txt, carbon.txt, humans.txt, security.txt and robots.txt.
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