Filter the available WSG Success Criteria upon certain settings
Testable
Impact
Effort
Materials
Energy
Water
Emissions
Standards
Considerations
Categories

Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) covers a wide range of recommendations for making websites and products more sustainable. Following these guidelines which utilize planetary, people, and prosperity (PPP) principles throughout the decision-making processes, you can minimize your environmental impact through a mixture of user-centered design, performant web development, renewable infrastructure, sustainable business Strategy, and (with metrics) various combinations of those mentioned. It should be noted that these guidelines will not address every possible mechanism or Strategy to become sustainable, as such, these guidelines (which are notably Web orientated and focused) should be seen as a starting point in a sustainability journey (coverage does not extend for example to manufacturing or shipping of physical products). Following these guidelines will often make Web content more accessible, usable, and performant as a by-product.

To use these guidelines, it is highly recommended that you take a methodical approach. Rather than working through the entire document and broadly attempting to apply everything held within to your project or service, scroll through the table of contents to find a guideline that appeals to either your skill set or that you (based upon the impact / effort rating) feel comfortable in attempting to tackle. Sustainable change is measured in progress over perfection and by breaking down the specification into achievable goals based upon guidelines or even success criteria, you can more easily progress toward long-term targets. Guideline examples and resources may also provide implementation guidance while benefits can help justify their usage to management.

This document has been reviewed by Interest Group members and interested parties. This is a draft document which may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than a work in progress. The Interest Group's role in publishing is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment.

By publishing these guidelines, the Interest Group does not expect that the work produced in this specification will affect the work undertaken by other W3C sustainability, accessibility, or performance groups. The Interest Group will continue to track these Working, Interest, and Community Groups as appropriate. This specification closely aligns itself with the principles laid down for Web Platform Design [[design-principles]], Privacy [[privacy-principles]], the Ethical Web [[ethical-web-principles]], and Human Rights [[HR-Spec]].

To provide feedback regarding this specification, the preferred method is using GitHub. It is free to create a GitHub account to file issues. Comments received on the specification cannot result in changes to this version of the guidelines but may be addressed in errata or future versions of WSG. A list of issues filed as well as archives of previous mailing list public-sustainableweb@w3.org (archive) discussions are publicly available. There is currently no preliminary interoperability or implementation report, however one of the key tasks of this Interest Group is to examine the potential for better models for digital sustainability that can feed into tooling (and thus into large studies of implementations) that can be reported upon and fed back into guidance for the Web Sustainability Guidelines.

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    Introduction

Introduction

Plain language summary of Introduction
  • The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) promote good sustainability best practices based on the latest evidence and research.
  • WSG apply to applications, websites, and other Internet-related products and services.
  • The guidelines feature Success Criteria you MUST comply with, and provide other features that can help with decision-making and implementation.
  • Digital sustainability is a complex topic, so the best guidance may change over time, and other considerations (such as non-digital factors) should be taken into account.

Background on WSG

In 1999, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines [[WCAG22]] defined a set of baseline guidance for Web content developers and creators of authoring tools, with the primary goal of promoting Web accessibility through the adoption of inclusive strategies. Through a similar methodology, the Web Sustainability Guidelines promote planetary, people, and prosperity best practices based on measurable, evidence-based research; aimed at end-users, stakeholders, website or application creators, tool authors, tool authors, educators, students, policymakers, purchasing agents, product owners, managers, and decision-makers, with the primary goal of reducing harm to the wider ecosystem (regarding people and the planet) through sustainable Strategy adoption.

For those unfamiliar with sustainability issues relating to the Web, consider that many variables [[VARIABLES]] may contribute to waste or emissions being produced online.

Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) is developed in cooperation with individuals and organizations around the world. It does so intending to provide a shared Strategy for Web sustainability that meets the needs of individuals, organizations, and governments internationally. WSG is designed to apply broadly to different existing Web technologies and to be testable with a combination of automated testing and human evaluation.

Web sustainability depends not only on sustainable websites and products but also on sustainable Web browsers and other user agents, examples include the performance of rendering and the accurate measuring of website energy use through developer tooling. Authoring tools also have an important role in Web sustainability, by ensuring performant code, reducing waste, and the results are served in the most sustainable way possible.

Significant challenges were encountered in finding existing research data to both identify and establish guidance for all the variables that affect Web sustainability, which came as no surprise with the subject being such an emerging and rapidly evolving field. Work will continue in this area in future versions of WSG.

The WSG were originally developed under the guidance of the Sustainable Web Design Community Group. W3C Community Groups act as incubator hubs where ideas for new technologies and standards can be discussed without formal constraints.

Over two years with the help of over 100 subject matter experts from around the globe, the group created the first draft, and subsequently through GitHub and regular meetings continued over another year to progress the WSG and its supplements to a level of maturity in which the group and its work were ready to become a part of the W3C family (where this specification continues being developed to this day).

WSG layers of guidance

The individuals and organizations that use WSG vary widely and include Web designers and developers, policymakers, purchasing agents, teachers, and students. To meet the varying needs of this audience, several layers of guidance are provided including general guidelines, testable success criteria, impact and effort ratings, advisory potential benefits, documented examples, Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) ratings, evidence-based links, and category tags.

All of these layers of guidance (guidelines, success criteria, impact, effort, benefits, reporting, examples, resources, and tags) work together to provide guidance on how to make content more sustainable. Authors are encouraged to view and apply all layers that they can (relevance, time, or budget permitting), including the additional content, to best make their product or service the most sustainable it can become. It should be considered that while great care has been taken to make these guidelines as well-rounded and feature-complete as possible, there will likely be additional tasks authors can perform to improve sustainability which this specification failed to address due to (for example) new techniques becoming available.

Principles

At the top are six principles that provide the foundation for Web Sustainability: clean, efficient, open, honest, regenerative, and resilient.

These guiding principles were chosen to act as the foundation of the WSG on the basis that they opened the conversation as to what Web sustainability could and should mean for website or application creators and product owners attempting to make a change to benefit people and the planet.

While the primary focus of our guidelines is sustainability in the environmental impact sense, to avoid narrowing our definition, as with many frameworks this specification takes an PPP approach to sustainability. The benefit of this methodology is that while we do recognize the importance of energy / carbon accounting and reduction, we avoid carbon tunnel vision and seek to approach digital sustainability reductions through additional measures such as through the reduction of water waste and raw material conservation such as paper. We also are mindful of the social aspects of sustainability and the importance of people as well as the planet, thereby including important criteria, notes, and cross-links where appropriate to W3C work in accessibility, privacy, and other groups and including mentions of Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR), ethical behavior, and other important disciplines.

Of course, principles on their own do not make for good testable guidelines, which is why our guidelines are as heavily evidence-weighted as possible, aligning with existing sustainability reporting frameworks and standards (such as GRI). We also have made every effort possible to map our work to comply with existing and upcoming worldwide regulatory frameworks to assist with compliance.

Guidelines

Under the principles are guidelines. These guidelines provide the basic goals that authors should work toward to make content more sustainable. The guidelines provide the framework and overall objectives to help authors understand the success criteria, which are testable against, to implement better digital solutions. This specification groups guidelines within four categories (User Experience Design, Web Development, Infrastructure, Product and Business) that overarches various specialisms. It should, however, be noted that while many of these guidelines are curated into categories for simplicity, often they are not limited to a single group and can be utilized within other specialisms for a sustainability benefit. They also come equipped with tags that can be utilized by third-party user-agent tools to filter the criteria on journeys, categories, preferences, or additional variables to benefit the author during the implementation process.

Success Criteria

For each guideline, testable success criteria are provided. WSG success criteria are written as testable statements that are not technology-specific. Guidance about satisfying the success criteria in specific technologies, as well as general information about interpreting the success criteria is provided in separate documents or within third-party sources as cited evidence. Details regarding machine testability and whether human testing or intervention is required in order to meet a success criteria are indicated against each success criteria. Resources (third-party evidence-based links) are denoted to allow authors to better understand and meet the Success Criteria for compliance purposes. These Resources are also provided within a separate document and all information within is subject to change.

This specification offers interactivity. You can filter and see only the Success Criteria that apply to your interests / choices by viewing the Full Document mode of the WSG and clicking the interactive "Filter the available WSG Success Criteria upon certain settings" link at the top of the content. Your choices will reveal themselves upon selecting from the categories and checkboxes.

Additional information

These guidelines come with both an impact and effort rating system. Unlike other W3C specifications, WSG uses a simple system of Low, Medium, or High ratings against each individual guideline to reduce the burden for individuals to identify quick wins or minimal implementations, from long-term benefits or heavy refactoring while encouraging a policy of progress over perfection.

Impact:

Low
Quick sustainability wins.
Medium
Noticeable sustainable impact.
High
Significant long-term benefit.

Effort:

Low
Minimal implementation.
Medium
Some changes are needed.
High
Heavy refactoring is required.

For each of the guidelines and success criteria in the WSG document itself, the Interest Group has also documented a wide variety of potential benefits. The benefits are informative and may potentially justify the scope for compliance with the specification.

Furthermore, for those requiring guidelines to be linked to a standardized methodology that can be used in reporting the digital sustainability conformance levels of a business, a section on GRI compliance is provided.

GRI Impact:

As with impact and effort ratings, a similar scoring methodology has been used within each rating section.

Low
This will have a minimal impact within a particular category.
Medium
This will have an impact worthy of consideration within a particular category.
High
This will have a considerable impact within a particular category.

For this specification, an open source Jupyter Notebook was created. As an input, it takes a spreadsheet containing all the guidelines and (using low, medium, or high) their indicators of impact on the reduction of server resource usage, network transfer, and end-user device usage. Then it takes data from a GreenIT Report [[FOOTPRINT]] which estimates the environmental impact of the mentioned categories across material use, water use, energy use, and GHG emissions. It then combines these datasets and estimates the comparative impact of a given recommendation on different sections of GRI taxonomy.

Examples (where possible) are provided, comprised of either URL resources or code samples to showcase how a Success Criteria within a guideline could be addressed. Tags are also provided in order to help individuals identify the relationships that occur between our material and particular groups.

Interpretation

It should be noted that the coverage of the Layers of Guidance, with particular emphasis on the impact and effort ratings, may be left open to interpretation, due to the broad and varying nature of how variables can benefit the wider ecosystem. For example, a guideline may have a low impact on preserving water but a high impact on preserving electricity. As such, the nature of benefits is nuanced and may require more in-depth analysis if authors wish to target specific environmental concerns such as water, paper, or mineral waste.

Currently, the Web Sustainability Guidelines use a crude metric of human assessment from subject-matter experts and a stated calculation and methodology underpinning the GRI reporting. However, future versions of the specification will seek to expand upon this, emphasizing metric-based calculations and proven datasets through measurability to identify emissions (and other) related targets.

It should also be noted that a drawback of the sustainability sector is that unlike other forms of measurement in other fields (such as web performance and accessibility) where binary conversations can occur (something either "is" or "is not" happening), there is unlikely to be a situation where a product or service is never emitting or causing some sort of impact upon the environment by nature of it existing. As such, implementors need to come to terms with the fact that the aim of the Web Sustainability Guidelines should be to firstly reduce what you can, then for what you cannot (as emissions will likely always occur to some extent) compensate for these continuous emissions to ensure as minimal a footprint as possible.

Coverage should not be restricted to what falls within the digital sector. While for this specification we primarily focus on Internet-related technologies (and the people and businesses that use them), sustainability variables exist beyond the scope of this work and as such, the impacts of these differing areas of concern should be addressed when meeting targets, reporting, and complying with relevant legislation.

Relationships

The body of work and landscape WSG builds on is constantly evolving. Some, typically referred to as "living" or "evergreen" standards, are subject to change frequently, and their impact on this publication's validity may be immediate. Others are updated less regularly and the changes may not affect WSG publications until a new revision is issued.

In all cases, it is therefore prudent that implementors should regularly ensure that best practices have not changed due to new research or data and that any tooling they are using is frequently updated to account for compliance changes occurring as a result of more weighty evidence and guidance.

Relationship to AFNOR
Association Française de Normalisation is a Paris-based standards organization and a member body for France at the International Organization for Standardization. WSG directly references the AFNOR SPEC 2201 document where guidelines may have relatable sustainability associations.
Relationship to ARCEP
The Autorité de Régulation des Communications Électroniques, des Postes et de la Distribution de la Presse is the regulatory authority for telecommunications in France. Explicit comparison notes from guidelines that match (for compliance purposes) pointing to the General Policy Framework for the Ecodesign of Digital Services (GPFEDS) inside each WSG relevant guideline reference section have been provided.
Relationship to AWS and Microsoft Azure WAF
Amazon and Microsoft Azure both provide a Well-Architected Framework offering a set of best practices that helps protect digital products from consuming excessive resources. Where sustainability measures match the evidence and guidelines within the WSG, cross-links have been placed within guideline resources.
Relationship to GR491
The Handbook of Sustainable Design of Digital Services (also known as GR491) is a series of sustainability best practices, published by the Institute for Sustainable IT. Alike many other best practice guides, where matching compliance targets can be found to the WSG guidelines and Success Criteria, cross-links in the resources section have been provided.
Relationship to GreenIT
The GreenIT 115 best practices of web Eco-Design project is an open source French collaboration to provide meaningful goals to reduce a digital carbon footprint. As there are many parallels between WSG and the open source GreenIT project, guideline references note prior work from this project where it exists.
Relationship to GRI
Global Reporting Initiative is an international independent standards organization that helps organizations and individuals understand and communicate their sustainability impact. As denoted in [[[#additional-information]]], WSG provides metrics relating to GRI Standards to offer more targeted guidance for regulatory compliance goals. As our measurability improves, our results are subject to change.
Relationship to OpQuast
OpQuast is a quality assurance provider that offers checklists for things such as Web quality assurance. While many of the improvements noted fall out of the sustainability scope, several directly relate to WSG Success Criteria or may impact guidelines as a secondary effect and should be considered. As this list is comprehensive, items deemed of consequence are noted in the resources section for relevant guidelines.
Relationship to SDGs
The United Nations Member States in 2015 as a result of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development created the Sustainable Development Goals. While some of these goals are notably difficult to achieve by individual action, wherever digital / Web technology interconnects with an explicit SDG target (and WSG could help shift towards compliance), the SDG target is noted within the references for each guideline.

Conformance

As well as sections marked as non-normative, all authoring diagrams, examples, and notes in this specification are non-normative. Everything else in this specification is normative. The main normative content of WSG is composed of guidelines and success criteria, which define requirements that impact conformance claims. Non-normative material provides advisory information to help interpret the guidelines but does not create requirements that impact a conformance claim.

This section lists requirements for conformance to WSG. It also provides information about how to make optional conformance claims.

Conformance requirements

The WSG approach to conformance differs from WCAG in that in preference to having conformance levels, these guidelines are robustly built so that they can be implemented over time, in a non-specific order, and each will provide some measurable sustainability benefit. As such, conformance is measured upon the implementation of each guideline (and all of its success criteria being met) across the whole website or product.

Total conformance is achieved by meeting every Success Criteria for every guideline within the specification. As a general policy, most websites or products will not likely be able to satisfy all Success Criteria. This could be as a result of time commitments for refactoring code, or because certain guidelines and Success Criteria simply do not apply to your work. In these situations, it is not recommended that authors prioritize conformance over other important website features such as security updates. Pragmatism and progress over perfection should be considered paramount when implementing and conforming to these guidelines.

Conformance claims

Conformance claims are not required. Authors can conform to WSG without making a claim. If a conformance claim is made, then the conformance claim must include the following information:

  1. Date of the claim.
  2. Guidelines title, version, and URI "Web Sustainability Guidelines at https://w3c.github.io/sustainableweb-wsg/".
  3. Conformance: A concise description of Sustainability commitments and a list of the guidelines adhered to.
  4. Other: In addition to the required components of a conformance claim above, provide additional information to assist visitors such as additional steps taken (beyond the specification) to improve sustainability or statistics (metrics) that show the effect of changes that have already been made.

Recording conformance claims may be helpful for utilization within a sustainability statement or a method of proving that you are meeting sustainability reduction targets (such as for internal scope accounting).

Greenwashing

In the field of sustainability, the potential for greenwashing (misappropriation or deliberately misinterpreting our work to appear greener than you are) is a very real threat. Within other fields of the tech industry (such as web accessibility), false claims can lead to harm to users. In sustainability, harm can occur not only to users of a product or service but also to the wider ecosystem.

As such, with claims of conformance, we advise consumers and implementors to do the following:

  • Do not claim the Web Sustainability Guidelines as a mark of total sustainability (as there will always be gaps in this document's coverage).
  • Only make claims that they can reasonably justify with evidence to back up such statements (and provide easy access to this).
  • If you come across an organization or individual making claims regarding the WSG that appear unlikely or untrue, request the claims be justified, rectified, or removed.

Legislation exists (or is coming into force globally) providing coverage around sustainability claims and as such, penalties for greenwashing will not only be detrimental to your visitors but to your business.

WSG supporting documents

The WSG document is designed to meet the needs of those who need a stable, referenceable technical specification. Other documents, called supporting documents, are based on this document and address other important purposes, including providing further techniques regarding implementation strategies, guiding authors through the guidelines that apply to their use case, and how WSG would be applied to new technologies.

Requirements for WSG

WSG meets a set of requirements for WSG which, in turn, inherit requirements from any prior versions. Requirements structure the overall framework of guidelines and ensure backward compatibility. The Interest Group also used a less formal set of acceptance criteria for success criteria which is based on evidence-supported practices grouped by their impact and implementation upon the Web ecosystem. This allows for further expansion in future versions while maintaining a strict grouping of related (and overlapping) guidelines.

Versions of guidance

WSG was initiated to improve Web Sustainability guidance. As no prior version exists, the initial draft was created through initial Community Group meetings, proposals (laid out in meeting minutes), and early draft guidelines were drawn up and refined, leading to the guidelines included in this version. This work has been continued through the formation of a W3C Interest Group to enhance and improve upon the work of the early Community Group. The Interest Group considers that WSG incrementally advances Web Sustainability in numerous areas, but underscores that not all potential environmental improvements are met by these guidelines.

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    User Experience Design

User Experience Design

If you are creating content and systems designed for users, then whether you know it or not, you are working in user experience (UX).

Good user experience reduces time and resources wasted on the journey. Poor user experience does the opposite, often also harming accessibility. Meanwhile, visual design choices and how we present information can have some of the biggest impacts on asset size, performance, and overall web sustainability.

Goals include:

Benefits include:

Plain language summary of User Experience Design
  • Identify and address issues affecting your service, audience, visitors, users, non-users, and other affected parties.
  • Cultivate a lightweight experience based around well-written content, thoughtfully designed and optimized assets, and appropriate alternatives.
  • Guide users quickly to their objectives with an effective navigation system and layout using recognized patterns.
  • Create, apply, document, and share efficient design systems to reduce duplication.
  • Enable accessible interaction, using forms only when necessary.
  • Integrate regular audits and tests into your project release calendar.

Display any variables that have a negative impact on your project

Success Criterion: External variables

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify existing or potential negative external variables affecting a project. Disclose these in a publicly available resource, identifying areas where digital sustainability can be improved. Perform this audit at the start of your project and at regular intervals.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Many variables can impact the user experience, and a bunch of these can impact how sustainable your website will be. Attempting to identify where you can make a difference to the visitor and give them a more sustainable experience will be beneficial.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Understanding the audience can identify potential improvements that go beyond basic inclusive design practices.
  • Environment: Constructing a plan to reduce emissions enables improvement over time.
  • Privacy: Having an overview of components makes it easier to identify potential data protection risks.
  • Social Equity: Auditing variables can reveal factors not commonly understood or covered in established best practices, enabling better support for underrepresented groups.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, Hardware, Ideation, Networking, Performance, Reporting, Research, Social Equity, Software

Understand visitor requirements or constraints, resolving barriers to access

Success Criterion: Audience evaluation

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify primary and secondary target visitors. Evaluate and define their needs through quantitative and/or qualitative research, testing, or analytics. Ensure your visitors and affected communities are consistently and closely involved in the research and testing process.

Success Criterion: Visitor constraints

Machine-testable and Resources

Account for potential visitor constraints, such as the device age, operating system choice or version, browser, VPN use, and connection speeds when designing and assessing the quality of user experiences.

Success Criterion: Barriers and access

Machine-testable and Resources

Conduct internal and user research to identify whether a technical, material, or human constraint might require adaptations to reduce barriers or improve access to content.

Success Criterion: Barrier removal

Human-testable and Resources

Remove identified barriers to access. These can include dark or deceptive design patterns, accessibility issues, or other pain points.

Success Criterion: Seat at the table

Human-testable and Resources

Assign all involved parties, including visitors, an equitable role in the decision-making process when undertaking research, identifying needs, or iterative design work.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

When creating a product or service, identifying your target audience through user-research, analytics, data collected using ethical anonymous methods, or feedback from and with visitors is important in being able to create a customized service for and with them that is tailor-made for their specific preferences, adapted for any needs they may have, and particularly useful in helping a website or application evolve its service to meet sustainability targets.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Understanding the needs of your audience through accessibility and trauma-informed research will help you prioritize design improvements to boost accessibility beyond the basics.
  • Conversion: Meeting audience requirements increases the likelihood that they will use it regularly and recommend it to others, improving its adoption rate and reputation.
  • Economic: Responding to the needs of your audience means they are more likely to convert and purchase.
  • Environment: Undertaking research to identify real visitor needs and behaviour means developers can avoid wasting time, effort, and emissions on building unnecessary features.
  • Performance: Use visitor research to identify UX bottlenecks that cause visitor abandonment. Fixes can be measured, tested, and evaluated to further improve performance and reduce emissions through removing those bottlenecks and inefficiencies.
  • Privacy: Assessing visitor needs and being minimal with further information requests will help you comply with privacy legislation.
  • Social Equity: Improving UX with compatibility in mind means products or services work better for visitors who might otherwise face various barriers to accessing content - such as older devices, low-bandwidth environments, or restrictive territories, language. This reduces e-waste and improves equity if older equipment meets needs for longer.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, Ideation, Patterns, Reporting, KPIs, Research, Social Equity, UI, Usability

Understand the impact for non-users

Success Criterion: Non-user impact

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish a plan of action for non-users and other affected parties who might be indirectly impacted by choices made in e-commerce, this can include neighbors accepting parcels or traffic jams due to deliveries. Other examples include the local health impacts of infrastructure emissions, or supply chain pressure. Research non-user needs, understand how they might be affected, and consider ways negative effects could be mitigated.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

If you provide physical goods or services, you may also have to account for the sustainability impact of delivery services. This can often be tricky, but courier companies may provide useful tooling to help you identify emissions data for routing.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Including people who are not primary or secondary users, such as people with disabilities, in research means their specific needs can be addressed more effectively.
  • Economic: Researching the entire ecosystem, including the broader or indirect impact and services, helps organizations to manage budgets more effectively.
  • Environment: Making certain interventions, such as coordinating planning with suppliers, can significantly reduce the environmental impact of a digital product or service.
  • Social Equity: Including marginalized or excluded groups in the research process makes it easier to avoid unintended consequences or requirements relating to these groups ahead of time.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

E-Waste, Hardware, Ideation, KPIs, Marketing, Reporting, Research, Social Equity, Usability

Integrate sustainability into every stage of the ideation process

Success Criterion: Sustainable brand development

Human-testable and Resources

Optimize all branding materials and assets approved during the ideation process in line with sustainability best practices prior to deployment. This also applies to brand refreshes, rebranding, and later enhancements. Make publicly available branding guidelines detailing the sustainability impact and best-practice deployment of materials and assets.

Success Criterion: Wireframes and prototypes

Human-testable and Resources

Use wireframes and rapid prototyping to quickly build consensus, reduce risk, and reduce the number of resources needed to build features. Evaluate the impact of all tools used.

Success Criterion: Participation and testing

Human-testable and Resources

Use the participatory design approach to involve users within the iteration and design process. When conducting user testing, reach out to your community to help improve your product. Provide opportunities for users to apply their knowledge and experience to your product or service.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

While some things require the use of electricity, during the early ideation phase you could consider wireframing or rapid prototyping (using paper) among other offline tools to reduce energy consumption. Even the electronic versions of these may have a lower carbon cost than committing to building a full-blown experience for each idea.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Conversion: Testing user interfaces usually leads to improved conversion rates as they can be optimized accordingly. This includes removing anything that causes friction and designing content in a way that optimizes user flow, reducing emissions while maximizing conversion.
  • Economic: Incorporating wireframes, prototypes, and user testing into early product design cycles reduces money and effort otherwise wasted building features people will not use.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Ideation, Research, Social Equity, Software, Strategy, UI

Brainstorm ways to resolve any affected party issues

Success Criterion: Human-centered brainstorming

Human-testable and Resources

Use a human-centered approach in brainstorming to consider the needs, interests, and impact on directly and indirectly affected parties.

Success Criterion: Ecological brainstorming

Human-testable and Resources

Consider planetary needs and ecological boundaries during the brainstorming process. This can include creating non-user, non-human (animal, planet) personas, or climate-specific user stories and sprints.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Brainstorming allows you to flush out ideas before you commit to pursuing a path. Being considerate of not just your visitors but other individuals who may be affected by your product or service (including non-humans, like the environment!) is a useful practical exercise as it may influence your decisions in how you scope your project.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Understanding real-world accessibility requirements in the early development stages makes it possible to prioritize inclusive design throughout the entire lifecycle. This improves efficiency, as developers will not be prompted to add in accessibility later. It will also reduce emissions associated with the patching process.
  • Environment: Helping key contributors to better understand the environmental impact makes it possible to track and reduce that impact throughout the lifecycle of a project.
  • Social Equity: Accounting for the needs of visitors who might otherwise face various barriers to accessing content - on such as older devices, in low-bandwidth environments, or have other barriers to accessing information early in the process will reduce the need for costly redesigns or adding appropriate alternatives at a later date.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Accessibility, Ideation, KPIs, Research, Social Equity, Strategy

Minimize non-essential content, interactivity, or journeys

Success Criterion: Efficient paths

Machine-testable and Resources

Make access as simple and efficient as possible. Displaying the time required to complete an action, reduction of choice, and ensuring visitors understand requirements at the start of a journey can improve user efficiency.

Success Criterion: Patterns for efficiency

Human-testable and Resources

Ensure user journeys are as smooth as possible. It also helps to build on established design patterns that people already understand.

Success Criterion: Distraction-free design

Machine-testable and Resources

Enable visitors to complete tasks without distractions or non-essential features getting in the way.

Success Criterion: Eliminate the non-essential

Machine-testable and Resources

Only show visitors information that is relevant to their experience, hiding non-essential information from view.

Success Criterion: User-initiated actionable content

Machine-testable and Resources

Ensure that disruptive actionable information, such as pop-up or modal windows, can only be initiated by the visitor.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

When providing the option to download, save, print, or access anything online, defaulting to the most lightweight, least featureful version will reduce emissions through passive browsing; with non-essential information removed from the screen either to be shown when it's required or eliminated.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Providing intuitive, lightweight user experiences improves understanding and accessibility, especially for people with cognitive disabilities. Reducing confusion, this can reduce the time spent trying to find content.
  • Conversion: Following conventions and patterns with a clean, distraction-free layout reduces churn, page abandonment, and barriers to entry.
  • Economic: Simplifying interfaces by reducing the amount of information can reduce the burden of choice and help to convert visitors during online decision-to-purchase processes. Reduced visitor choice will also reduce data payloads.
  • Environment: Streamlining user experience to remove barriers and the non-essential reduces unnecessary code and content payloads and the amount of time visitors spend on their devices trying to complete tasks or find information. This reduces the amount of energy used and lowers emissions.
  • Performance: Minimizing the amount of content on screen to what is genuinely required reduces bandwidth consumption over the lifecycle project and may make the user experience feel faster.
  • Privacy: Hiding non-essential features can improve data protection by reducing overall data collection overall, especially that associated with the integration of third-party services.
  • Social Equity: Reducing device and bandwidth requirements through providing more lightweight experiences can improve work better for visitors using older devices or located in low-bandwidth environments, and similar.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Content, Patterns, Performance, Social Equity, UI, Usability

Use decorative design with care

Success Criterion: Decorative design

Machine-testable and Resources

Use decorative design only when it enhances user experience. Remove unnecessary assets or those that do not enhance user experience or sustainability. Alternatively, make these optional and disabled by default.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

It's great to have a pretty-looking website or application but to ensure a sustainable design, it's important to avoid cluttering up the interface with too many visuals (which aren't necessary to the content). Keeping a clean design will reduce website rendering, and thereby emissions.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Focusing on clean design can reduce the negative intrusive or distracting feeling sometimes associated with decorative design.
  • Conversion: Reducing complexity and heavy elements makes it more likely content will load fast, which can lead to higher conversions.
  • Environment: Using fewer unnecessary elements reduces the resources required to render content.
  • Performance: Serving static assets, and fewer assets overall, can reduce the number of requests and loading time per page, improving performance.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Assets, Performance, UI, Usability

Ensure that navigation and wayfinding are well-structured

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide an accessible, easy-to-use navigation menu with search features to help visitors easily find what they need.

Success Criterion: Human-readable sitemaps

Machine-testable and Resources

Consider implementing an efficient and regularly updated sitemap for human visitors. While guidance beyond the nav bar may be unnecessary for smaller projects, clearly structured human-readable sitemaps can improve accessibility and help users find their way through websites or other online content with naturally complex or legacy information architecture.

Success Criterion: New content

Machine-testable and Resources

Implement lightweight and efficient means for visitors to learn about new content and services.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Information architecture is a central part of the Web development process, and how you structure a website ensures that people can way-find your content easily. Having appropriately marked-up links within your product or service allows visitors, search engines, and social networks to identify key information quickly.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Enabling easier navigation makes content accessible to people with disabilities. Bringing people to their goal faster also reduces data consumption.
  • Conversion: Optimizing structure can also boost conversion rates as people are more likely to find what they need. The same applies when users are made aware of new content related to their interests.
  • Economic: Shortening user journeys can also reduce hosting costs where this is linked to data transfer.
  • Environment: Improving navigation and search efficiency can reduce the time users spend finding what they need and achieving their objectives. This also lowers emissions.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Accessibility, HTML, Marketing, UI, Usability

Design to assist and not to distract

Success Criterion: User attention

Machine-testable and Resources

Ensure users can easily control how and when they receive information, with respect for their attention, focus, and mental energy.

Success Criterion: Distraction

Machine-testable and Resources

Prioritize features that assist rather than distract visitors, not unnecessarily prolonging the time they spend engaging with your content.

Success Criterion: Engagement traps

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid using design strategies intended to artificially prolong user attention, such as infinite scroll.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Time is precious, wasting a visitor's will cause frustration and lead to abandonment or resentment. Additionally, the more time a visitor spends in front of a screen, the more energy they utilize. As such, throwing stuff in front of the visitor vying for their attention might sound like good business (even though we know due to banner blindness it rarely works), but it mostly damages the environment and dissuades the visitor.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Reducing unnecessary barriers can improve accessibility and navigation using assistive technologies.
  • Environment: Using pagination rather than infinite scrolling allows individuals to request data on demand rather than encouraging overconsumption. This reduces carbon impact while encouraging healthy and sustainable browsing habits.
  • Performance: Avoiding attention traps improves user experience by reducing the time spent clicking through, closing, or hiding these distractions. Presenting the information in less distracting ways makes the experience feel faster, reduces barriers to access, and improves user flow.
  • Social Equity: Preserving user focus on their objectives reduces the potential for confusion, mistakes, and lapses in judgment.
  • Transparency: Avoiding dark and deceptive patterns will boost trust and encourage users to return or recommend.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Assets, Patterns, UI, Usability

Use established design patterns and appropriate components

Success Criterion: Design patterns

Machine-testable and Resources

Display only essential components at the time they are needed. Where appropriate, use familiar patterns to maximize ease of use.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Visitors can identify patterns fairly easily, and they like browsing websites and apps and feeling as if they know what they are dealing with. As such, focusing your efforts on producing a product or service that is clean and has key components in easy-to-recognize locations (and visuals) will allow faster user experiences and fewer emissions.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Using established design patterns makes it easier for all users to understand how to perform a task, especially those with greater accessibility needs.
  • Environment: Building using recognized design components will reduce the amount of time visitors spend trying to perform a task. The less time visitors spend achieving their goals, the lower their energy usage and emissions.
  • Performance: Using familiar design patterns that appear where visitors expect and only when appropriate can increase perceived performance due to more effective navigation.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Assets, CSS, Patterns, UI, Usability

Avoid being manipulative or deceptive

Success Criterion: Dark and deceptive design patterns

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid dark patterns, deceptive design, or unethical coding techniques that manipulate visitors into taking actions that are not in their best interest. Examples include anti-right click, copy prevention, requiring an account to purchase, etc.

Success Criterion: Advertisements

Human-testable and Resources

Select, present, and label advertisements and sponsorships transparently and only implement where these provide economic and ethical value without diminishing user experience.

Success Criterion: Analytics and tracking

Machine-testable and Resources

Evaluate and remove unnecessary or unused analytics and tracking, including any operating without user consent.

Success Criterion: Search Engine Optimization

Machine-testable and Resources

Focus on serving user intent through non-manipulative search and social media optimization. For example, do not misuse coding practices intended to support assistive technologies. This can include content with natural redundancy, or unhelpful or low-quality material designed only to manipulate search results.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Manipulating the visitor into doing things you want them to is a short-term gain, long-term loss tactic tool. It's ethically bad, unsustainable, and should be avoided at all costs.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Avoiding dark and deceptive design patterns improves user experience for people using assistive technologies, as these can be especially disruptive when using a screen reader. This improves their trust and access to your content.
  • Conversion: Avoiding dark and deceptive patterns can result in fewer complaints, reduce barriers, and improve conversion.
  • Environment: Avoiding deceptive design patterns reduces energy consumption because visitors do not waste time and energy trying to undo choices they never intended to make.
  • Performance: Using ethical, non-disruptive practices will accelerate the user journey and perceived speed and reduce unnecessary friction.
  • Privacy: Ensuring compliance with ethical privacy practices and avoiding dark and deceptive patterns reduces litigation risk. It also reduces data transmission between tracking and advertising services providers.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Accessibility, Assets, Compatibility, JavaScript, JavaScript, Patterns, Privacy, Security, Social Equity, UI, Usability

Make deliverables understandable and reusable

Success Criterion: Reusability

Machine-testable and Resources

Create deliverables, including documentation, in ways that facilitate later reuse.

Success Criterion: Documentation

Machine-testable and Resources

Document functionality and technical specifications so that they can be understood by everyone that needs to use them.

Success Criterion: Readability

Machine-testable and Resources

Developers have access to code comments and have the ability to view source to make it easier to access, understand, maintain, and use code.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Everything produced by designers, developers, writers, and those involved with a project should be in an open format, well maintained, and curated in a common format (so everyone is working from the same model).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Conversion: Using open and reusable formats lowers barriers to entry, as there will likely be no cost involved in participation. It can encourage users to play a more active role in the project.
  • Economic: Creating and maintaining good documentation will make implementation easier and reduce future ongoing costs associated with maintenance.
  • Environment: Using common and clear formats for deliverables will reduce the time users need to spend familiarizing themselves with and adapting to the environment. This reduces the energy spent managing a project and the associated emissions.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Assets, Content, Education, Patterns, Software

Use a design system for interface consistency

Success Criterion: Design system

Machine-testable and Resources

Use a design system based on web standards and established patterns to share interface components and ensure a consistent user experience.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Design systems allow common components and patterns to be formalized and managed within a website or application. By using such a tool, designers and developers can avoid reinventing existing tooling and thereby reduce wasted time (and emissions).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Using a design system with accessible components will improve access to information for people with disabilities. Building design features that integrate accessibility from the start ensures everyone is always included.
  • Conversion: Using design systems supports consistent user interfaces. This improves visitor trust because individuals will recognize familiar components and know how to use them. This can improve conversion rates as it will reduce frustration, abandonment, and possible complaints.
  • Economic: Using standardized components and avoiding redundancy can reduce development time and the associated costs. Familiarity makes the experience easier for users, reducing bounce rates.
  • Environment: Following web standards to build consistent interfaces requires less energy and resources, because they are naturally more optimized. Design systems that incorporate environmental criteria can help to scale digital sustainability and reduce redundancy, reduced energy use and negative impact.
  • Performance: Building design systems using standardized components reduces the need for repeat coding. This reduces developer coding time and can improve performance. Overall, sustainable patterns reduce emissions.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Assets, Education, Patterns, Strategy, UI, Usability

Provide clear, inclusive content with purpose

Success Criterion: Clear content

Machine-testable and Resources

Write content using plain and inclusive language, at an appropriate reading level for your audience. Account for specific needs in relation to accessibility, native language, and internationalization.

Success Criterion: Content formatting

Machine-testable and Resources

Use appropriate formatting for digital media. Provide a clear document structure with consideration of visual hierarchy. Use headings, bulleted lists, line spacing, and highlights appropriately. Provide information with appropriate formatting for the action users need to take.

Success Criterion: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Machine-testable and Resources

Prioritize SEO from the early design stages and throughout the lifecycle to ensure content can be found and used.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Everyone should be able to understand what you've written without wasting time staring at a screen or jumping from page to page looking for answers, whether they have accessibility requirements or not. This also means avoiding using technical language (without explanations) and including enough information to help direct people (and search engines) from page to page.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Using plain-language makes content easier to understand and accessible to more users. Good structure that complies with standards and expectations works better alongside assistive technologies, such as screen readers.
  • Conversion: Writing and presenting authoritative content with intent and care can lead to citation by third parties. This can increase traffic with pre-warmed leads.
  • Economic: Being recognized as an authoritative source can bring additional recognition, users, and opportunities.
  • Environment: Ensuring content is easy to find and comprehend enables users to make informed decisions faster, taking less time and resources. This reduces energy consumption and emissions.
  • Performance: Creating well-structured content can improve search performance. When content ranks higher in search engines, people are more likely to land in the right place straight away.
  • Social Equity: Using inclusive language that avoids jargon and unnecessary exclusion can improve user experience for a broader audience.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Accessibility, Content, Social Equity, UI, Usability

Optimize images for sustainability

Success Criterion: Need for images

Machine-testable and Resources

Determine the need for images with consideration of the quantity, format, and sizes required.

Success Criterion: Optimized images

Machine-testable and Resources

Resize, optimize, and compress each image. Provide images in appropriate sizes for different screen resolutions.

Success Criterion: Lazy loading

Machine-testable and Resources

Include lazy loading to ensure images only load when they are required.

Success Criterion: Sizing and deactivation

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide the option for images to be disabled or provide a low-fidelity alternative.

Success Criterion: Image management and use

Machine-testable and Resources

Set up a media management and use policy to reduce the overall impact of images. Include criteria for media compression and file formats.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Of all the data that comprises the largest over-the-wire transfer rates within the average website or application, images are usually those that are responsible due to their quantity and usefulness. As such, doing all you can to reduce their size and unnecessary loading will be beneficial for sustainability.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Optimizing resources means visitors with data caps can preserve their resources. Providers can enjoy reduced hosting costs due to less data being transferred.
  • Environment: Compressing and delivering images in lightweight formats can reduce the hardware burden on older devices. This can reduce overall consumer e-waste by slowing or eliminating forced upgrade cycles.
  • Performance: Optimizing images can accelerate performance by reducing HTTP requests, data transfer, and the physical rendering effort. All of these have an impact on user experience and performance.
  • Social Equity: Providing lightweight images makes it easier for users in low-bandwidth areas or those using older devices to access your content, provided these devices can support the formats used.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Example

								<img src="image.webp" alt="..." loading="lazy"/>
								<iframe src="video.html" title="..." loading="lazy"></iframe>
							

Tags

Assets, Content, HTML, Performance, Software, UI, Usability

Optimize media for sustainability

Success Criterion: Need for media

Machine-testable and Resources

Do not include any video or audio unless it provides positive value. Disable auto-play functionality on audio and video.

Success Criterion: Optimized media

Machine-testable and Resources

Optimize and compress media appropriately. Provide media in compatible and appropriate formats. Avoid non-native embedded media players.

Success Criterion: Deferred loading

Machine-testable and Resources

Load data-intensive media on the client side, including the media itself, behind a facade - a non-functional and static representational element.

Success Criterion: Control and label

Machine-testable and Resources

Let the visitor control media, including a choice of resolutions and formats and the option to deactivate media. Inform users the length, format, and data intensity of the media.

Success Criterion: Media management and use

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish media management and use policy to evaluate and reduce the overall impact of media, such as audio, video, or emerging media formats. Include criteria for media compression and file formats.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Video and audio-heavy websites are often those that can have significant sustainability costs in terms of storage and carbon intensity for viewers who have to process the media with their devices to watch them (draining batteries). Optimizing such assets as much as possible is critical for a sustainable product or service.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Eliminating data-intensive media entirely and using alternatives such as transcripts reduce costs associated with hosting and data transfer.
  • Environment: Reducing the battery drain associated with loading data-intensive content by preventing auto-loading or delaying it until the moment it is required reduces energy emissions associated with data transfer and renering.
  • Performance: Tailoring user experience to the device, situation, and environment of the visitor by having different resolutions and quality formats available reduces wasted bandwidth. This can boost performance for users who make choices to reduce the data downloaded.
  • Social Equity: Providing alternatives to data-intensive media allows with limited bandwidth or older devices to access content.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Assets, Content, HTML, Performance, Software, UI, Usability

Ensure animation is proportionate and easy to control

Success Criterion: Need for animation

Human-testable and Resources

Use animation only when it adds value and not for decorative elements.

Success Criterion: Avoiding overburdening

Machine-testable and Resources

Progressively display an appropriate number of animations to avoid overburdening the visitor or negatively impacting device performance. This includes setting a maximum number of replays or iterations.

Success Criterion: Control animation

Machine-testable and Resources

Allow visitors to start, stop, pause, or otherwise control animated content.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Animation can be both CPU and GPU-intensive and have implications for accessibility. While visually appealing and useful in certain situations, care and attention should be taken when considering the use of a high emissions technology.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Environment: Disabling and reducing animation to the essential, with appropriate optimization and user control, reduces rendering impact and associated emissions.
  • Performance: Compressing, removing, or otherwise reducing animation files reduces complexity, improving performance.
  • Social Equity: Catering to different perspectives on and preferences in relation to animation can improve acceptance and access for individuals using different devices and from different backgrounds.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Example

								@media (prefers-reduced-motion: reduce) {
									body *,
									body *::before,
									body *::after {
										animation-delay: -1ms !important;
										animation-duration: 1ms !important;
										animation-iteration-count: 1 !important;
										background-attachment: initial !important;
										transition-duration: 1ms !important;
										transition-delay: -1ms !important;
										scroll-behavior: auto !important;
									}
								}
							

Tags

Accessibility, CSS, JavaScript, Performance, UI, Usability

Use optimized and appropriate web typography

Success Criterion: Pre-installed typefaces

Machine-testable and Resources

Use pre-installed, web-safe typefaces wherever possible.

Success Criterion: Font optimization

Machine-testable and Resources

Limit the number of fonts used. Design or subset fonts to omit unnecessary or unused variations, such as font weight or characters. Use the most performant file format available.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Since the advent of the modern web, the ability to include embedded fonts and provide a more customized experience has seen their use explode. They aren't always the most performant option (which poses emissions hazards) and come with a few issues such as Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC) / Flash Of Unstyled Text (FOUT) which should be addressed.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Environment: Reducing the number and complexity of custom fonts used reduces data transfer and rendering effort, which lowers associated emissions.
  • Performance: Using optimized web fonts or system fonts supports a smoother user experience and faster rendering.
  • Social Equity: System fonts are preinstalled and are reliable, ensuring content can always be presented fast in a font users are familiar with.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								font-family: -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, avenir next, avenir, segoe ui, helvetica neue, helvetica, Cantarell, Ubuntu, roboto, noto, arial, sans-serif;
							

Tags

CSS, Performance, UI, Usability

Offer suitable alternatives for every format used

Success Criterion: Open formats

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide open alternatives, such as HTML, to proprietary file formats, such as PDF.

Success Criterion: Font stack fallbacks

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide a suitable font stack as a fallback when custom typefaces are used.

Success Criterion: Alternative text

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide meaningful alternative text for all descriptive images that are non-decorative and support the user's understanding of the content.

Success Criterion: Transcripts and text

Machine-testable and Resources

Include transcripts and/or text versions of media files as an alternative to playing the media.

Success Criterion: Video alternatives

Machine-testable and Resources

Include WebVTT closed captions and subtitles support for videos. Provide localization as expected by your audience, including subtitles and sign language that meet the same standard.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Media, images, fonts, and documents enrich the Internet. The problem is that people may not want to watch a video, listen to an audio file, look at an image, or use a specific application. By providing alternative formats to anything you embed, you ensure the widest possible audience can benefit from it (and reduced carbon output will occur as the alternative text will induce less consumer hardware thrashing than its rich media alternative).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Providing content in multiple formats means users can choose the format that best supports their needs, helping to eliminate barriers.
  • Conversion: Creating text alternatives to media, such as transcripts, means your content can be more easily found and indexed by search engines.
  • Economic: Hosting and delivering text is less computationally expensive than media, so providing text-based content can reduce hosting and bandwidth costs.
  • Environment: Offering low-impact alternatives to media formats reduces rendering and processing effort, and the associated emissions.
  • Performance: Reducing interactivity can help visitors access what they need faster.
  • Social Equity: Providing text alternatives for those who are not able to watch a video or listen to audio, even situationally, improves access and user experience.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								WEBVTT

								00:01.000 --> 00:04.000
								- Something happened yesterday morning.

								00:05.000 --> 00:09.000
								- Or was it in the evening?
								- I can't remember!
							

Tags

Accessibility, Assets, Compatibility, Content, HTML, Performance, Social Equity, UI, Usability

Provide accessible, user-friendly, minimal web forms

Success Criterion: Simple forms

Machine-testable and Resources

Remove unnecessary forms and reduce form content to the minimum necessary to meet the user needs while satisfying the organization's minimum requirements. Clearly communicate why a form is necessary, the value it provides, the number of steps required for completion, and what will be done with the collected data. Also disclose if the data will be shared with third parties.

Success Criterion: Functional forms

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid using auto-completion or auto-suggest based on partial entry to conserve user bandwidth and reduce unnecessary server side requests. Support the use of helpful tooling, such as password managers, by not preventing autofill.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Understandably, businesses want to know more about their customers, but a key part of sustainability is being ethical towards visitors and as such, the right to privacy is considered paramount. Don't demand information when it's not required and not only will this help visitors complete transactions quicker (reducing emissions), it will help with legal compliance such as GDPR.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Labeling your forms correctly and testing for accessibility and compatibility with a range of different devices and inputs reduces barriers. Autocomplete improves ease of use and efficiency for all use, especially those with additional accessibility needs. Well-labeled and accessible forms are more likely to be successfully completed.
  • Conversion: Building forms based on standards with ease of use and accessibility in mind boosts conversion, as more users are able to complete them.
  • Economic: Implementing more accessible and usable forms reduces frustration while increasing completion rates. This can reduce complaints, support costs, and abandonment.
  • Environment: Optimizing forms reduces the resources required to complete them, which reduces emissions.
  • Privacy: Collecting informed consent and providing helpful disclosures about cookies, data collection, and data processing within forms, alongside appropriate links to find further information in an accessible format, improves data privacy.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Accessibility, HTML, Privacy, Social Equity, UI, Usability

Consider the experience in non-visual browsers and interfaces

Success Criterion: Alternative interactions

Machine-testable and Resources

Support non-visual browsing methods and various non-graphical ways to interact with content. This includes anything from assistive technologies to voice agents. Consider and provide working alternatives to visual interfaces.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Certain visitors such as those with visual disabilities or speech agents (like Amazon Alexa) may rely on an experience without the graphical part of an interface. As such, they potentially may use less data or may have a different carbon impact on the Web.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Supporting non-visual browsing methods means people can access your content more easily when using specialized accessibility aids.
  • Conversion: Increasing compatibility by supporting a wider range of devices, beyond the most popular or well-known hardware and software, will enable interactions with new audiences and increase the likelihood of a positive outcome.
  • Environment: Allowing non-visual browsers to interact with your content can help to reduce overall emissions. Non-visual browsers may lack a display, which reduces the environmental impact of browsing.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								code {
									background-color: #292a2b;
									color: #e6e6e6;
									font-family: monospace;
									speak: literal-punctuation; /* Reads all punctuation out loud in iOS VoiceOver */
								}
							

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, Content, HTML, Performance, Social Equity, Software, UI, Usability

Provide useful notifications

Success Criterion: Need for notification

Human-testable and Resources

Remove non-essential notifications. Justify and reduce email, text message (SMS), and other invasive or energy-intense notifications to what is strictly necessary. Useful notifications, such as alerts for new content should be used with care and restraint.

Success Criterion: Notification settings

Human-testable and Resources

Let the user adjust their own notification and messaging settings. Ensure the options to unsubscribe, log out, and close an account should be available and visible. Ensure it is possible for the user to change their contact details.

Success Criterion: Prompts and responses

Machine-testable and Resources

Clearly explain the result of a potential input through helpful prompts and messages that explain errors, next steps, and other relevant information. This will help to manage users’ expectations.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Notifications whether through the browser or messaging can be potentially useful, but only used in moderation. Spam and the lack of control are contributing sources of Internet emissions and as such, businesses should aim to reduce such actions.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Signposting individuals to information through helpful notifications or error messages will reduce abandonment. All information must be presented in a way that does not discriminate, as this could exclude many potential users.
  • Environment: Notifying visitors about important events can reduce the need to constantly refresh pages. These notifications provide a shortcut, ensuring content is loaded when it becomes available. This can save emissions.
  • Privacy: Using notifications appropriately ensures personalized content is only displayed on specific devices, reducing the risk of information exposure.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								<form>
									<label for="choose">Would you prefer a banana or cherry? (required)</label>
									<input id="choose" name="i-like" required />
									<button>Submit</button>
								</form>
							

Tags

JavaScript, Privacy, UI, Usability

Reduce the impact of downloadable and physical documents

Success Criterion: Printed documents

Machine-testable and Resources

Design your process to reduce the need for paper documents. Where the production of paper documents is essential, it should be designed to have the lowest impact possible. Include a CSS print stylesheet and test it with different types of content. Encourage saving documents in digital formats over paper-based storage and archiving.

Success Criterion: Optimized documents

Machine-testable and Resources

Optimize and compress all downloadable documents. Make them available in a variety of accessible file formats.

Success Criterion: Optimized delivery

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid duplicating effort. If a document will be reused, generate and save it once on the server side for reuse, ideally on a cookie-free domain.

Success Criterion: Labels and choice

Machine-testable and Resources

Display the document name, a summary, the file size, and the format prior to downloading. Allow users to choose the right format and language for their needs where possible. Avoid embedding documents directly; provide a link to download or view them within the browser instead.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Printing or downloading documents can both be a net benefit and a net cost in terms of sustainability as it can reduce repeat requests to websites, but the act of printing (especially when unoptimized) wastes valuable ink and paper.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Providing a range of inclusively designed downloadable documents in a variety of formats benefits those with accessibility needs as they can choose the ideal format for their device and use case.
  • Environment: Reducing the need to print documents or providing a print friendly style sheet reduces emissions associated with paper, ink, and the act of printing.
  • Performance: Compressing or otherwise optimizing documents means they can be downloaded faster, avoiding users needing to wait to view documents prepared for offline viewing.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Assets, Compatibility, Content, E-Waste, Hardware, Performance, Software, UI, Usability

Get users and contributors invested in the project

Success Criterion: New features and perspectives

Machine-testable and Resources

Outline processes used to prototype and test new features, product ideas, and user interface components. Test with real users who represent different perspectives and user constraints.

Success Criterion: Resourcing and viability

Human-testable and Resources

Ensure prototyping and testing processes are sufficiently resourced to support long-term viability and avoid project abandonment.

Success Criterion: Training and onboarding

Human-testable and Resources

Produce or provide, training materials to properly educate and onboard new contributors.

Success Criterion: Testing and validation

Human-testable and Resources

Conduct regular and extensive testing alongside user interviews to validate whether released features meet internal goals and audience needs.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization has policies and practices in place to incorporate stakeholder-focused testing and prototyping into its product development cycles.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: Using a well-built, thoroughly tested interface is likely to reduce user frustration and churn.
  • Economic: Prioritizing user research in organizational policies helps to reduce and mitigate risks and costs associated with building unnecessary features, which would also incur technical debt. Performing iterative testing and prototyping reduces the resources needed to build new features.
  • Environment: Enabling users to complete tasks more quickly and efficiently reduces energy use and emissions.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Accessibility, Education, Governance, Ideation, Research, Social Equity, Strategy, UI, Usability

Audit and test for bugs or issues requiring resolution

Success Criterion: Regular audit

Machine-testable and Resources

Check the codebase for bugs, identify performance issues, and account for accessibility or security problems at appropriate regular intervals, such as every month or quarter.

Success Criterion: Non-regression tests

Machine-testable and Resources

Implement non-regression tests for all critical features.

Success Criterion: Regression tests

Machine-testable and Resources

Incorporate regression testing into each release cycle to ensure new features do not introduce bugs or otherwise conflict with existing functionality.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Products and services at any stage of a project can suffer bugs or issues that need to be resolved. Fixing these regressions also generates additional development and environmental costs. By resolving such issues, you can reduce the chances of a visitor giving up on a session and thereby reduce the amount of wasted energy your website emits overall.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Maintaining inclusivity over time through regular audits and testing reduces outages, improves access to information, and creates a better experience for all users, not just those with accessibility needs.
  • Economic: Performing ongoing regression testing improves security, which reduces risk and its associated costs.
  • Environment: Carrying out regular service audits reduces technical debt, which improves performance and environmental sustainability. Regression analysis also supports continuous improvement and lowers resource use over time, which in turn reduces emissions.
  • Security: Auditing a product or service regularly will identify potential sources of breaches and areas of improvement in security and privacy.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, KPIs, Performance, Privacy, Reporting, Research, Security, Social Equity, Strategy, UI, Usability

Measure and test for performance

Success Criterion: Performance testing

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify and resolve bottlenecks or issues in the underlying code or infrastructure which could impact sustainability and performance. Consider both simulated and real-world metrics. Monitor performance across every release cycle using appropriate tooling or through research and auditing.

Success Criterion: Compliant measurement

Machine-testable and Resources

Collect only data required to provide a streamlined and effective user journey and comply with relevant accessibility and data protection legislation. Put policies in place to ensure strict adherence.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Try to ethically measure how efficient a visitor's experience is by analyzing the performance of the website or application and how it has been constructed, by doing so you might be able to reduce any issues they may have encountered previously, decrease loading times, and reduce the burden of loading unnecessary pages.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Conversion: Increasing page load speed can measurably improve conversion rates, as visitors will be less likely to abandon a product or service if the content appears instantaneously.
  • Economic: Storing and transferring less data reduces costs for content hosts and website and application owners.
  • Environment: Improving performance of a website or application increases device longevity, as visitors will be less compelled to upgrade their devices.
  • Performance: Loading less data improves performance. Lighter pages are rendered and available to visitors quicker, helping to improve the UX.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								<link rel="prefetch" href="/articles/" as="document">
							

Tags

Accessibility, KPIs, Networking, Performance, Privacy, Research, Strategy, Usability

Evaluate feature use, value, and impact

Success Criterion: Usage changes

Human-testable and Resources

Monitor visitor feedback, adoption, and churn rates in relation to different features and incorporate these insights into future releases.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Occasionally, you may find that features you have developed for a product or service have little to no active users or could be better implemented to bring better value. Undertaking research to identify redundancy allows you to optimize your codebase (and reduce emissions).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Conversion: Acting on feedback often improves conversion rates because it ensures that your digital product or service reflects the needs of your audience.
  • Economic: Avoiding wasted development time building features that bring little value to the consumer means resources can be focused where they deliver more value.
  • Environment: Learning from feedback enables choices that improve environmental impact. An example of this would be making sure that the most frequently used features are placed higher in the visual hierarchy. This reduces the effort and time users must invest to achieve their goals.
  • Performance: Performing user testing allows you to retain focus on goal and maintain good performance without unnecessary complexity.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

KPIs, Research, Strategy, Usability

Verify that real-world users can successfully use your work

Success Criterion: Usability testing

Human-testable and Resources

Incorporate usability testing into product cycles and routinely measure the impact of these tests for future releases.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Researching a product or service and how it is used over time allows you to iterate and ensure the features and functionality being offered match how user-needs change over time. Doing so will help you reduce code redundancy further and reduce emissions through optimization.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Gathering feedback from people with disabilities can guide key improvements. This ensures your project can be used by the widest possible audience.
  • Environment: Ensuring visitors can quickly and easily accomplish tasks or access information reduces the energy used searching for answers.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Accessibility, KPIs, Research, Social Equity, Strategy, UI, Usability

Regularly test and maintain compatibility

Success Criterion: Compatibility policy

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish and maintain a compatibility policy which covers current and obsolete devices and software versions, listing the supported device brands, operating systems, and browsers (including versions). Update this regularly in line with new releases.

Success Criterion: Maintaining compatibility

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid planned obsolescence. Strive to maintain compatibility for as long as possible and communicate clearly whether an update is evolutionary, as in large updates that can significantly reduce performance, or corrective, as in smaller updates that fix bugs or improve security.

Success Criterion: Frequent testing

Machine-testable and Resources

Test performance in various scenarios to ensure compatibility. Testing should cover weak, unstable, restricted, or slow connections, old browsers, and devices older than five years.

Success Criterion: Mobile friendly

Human-testable and Resources

Use device-adaptable methods such as responsive design and prototype interfaces to support progressive enhancement and content prioritization.

Success Criterion: Progressive web applications (PWAs)

Machine-testable and Resources

Use a PWA over a native mobile application if it meets sustainability, interoperability, and compatibility criteria.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Compatibility is a critical part of the sustainability mindset and should be prioritized through all products and services. If individuals wish to use older devices (or cannot upgrade due to cost) or do not wish to upgrade as frequently, it will reduce the amount of e-waste that enters the system. If something doesn't work, it's also likely to result in visitors suffering a wasted effort, potentially leading to refused access to your service (and thereby emitting further emissions).

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Incorporating accessibility into early prototypes ensures it remains a priority throughout the lifecycle. Broken code can also impact assistive technologies, such as screen readers, and how they describe content to individuals with visual disabilities. Semantic code can help to deliver an equal, error-free experience to all.
  • Conversion: Delivering products and services that last longer and enjoy longer-lasting compatibility can increase conversion rates, due to the lower abandonment rates and a broader audience that is able to use a barrier-free version of the product or service.
  • Economic: Saving time and improving quality results in cost reductions, because increased stability reduces the need for refactoring. Users benefit from greater trust and potentially lower costs and maintenance fees as upgrades may not be required as frequently.
  • Environment: Avoiding incompatibility issues can significantly reduce e-waste, with planned obsolescence being is one of the biggest contributors to e-waste worldwide.Extending lifespans and improving compatibility within your service plan can improve sustainability and slow the upgrade cycle otherwise driven by sluggish digital experiences.
  • Performance: Deploying incompatible code has an energy cost. When code is non-standard, deprecated or does not work on a device, it can take additional time to render because it is usually not optimized for the environment. This puts pressure on the CPU and wastes battery. Using modern web standards will help your service run reliably in modern browsers.
  • Social Equity: Enhancing compatibility and longevity helps to reduce the digital divide. This can be significant in relation to income inequality, infrastructure robustness, or accessibility, for example. Broader support can therefore open your work to new markets, or extend the viability of existing access. Similarly, because progressive web applications use established web standards, they are available to more people than more cost-prohibitive closed systems.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, KPIs, Research, Security, Social Equity, Software, Strategy, UI, Usability

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    Introduction
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    Web Development

Web Development

Sustainable web design and development practices at the front-end and back-end often intersect with best practices, unlocking numerous benefits for people and the planet alike.

Front-end and back-end web development play a big role in creating a sustainable web. The result is code that runs more efficiently and transparently. Products are better able to meet visitor and user objectives, fast, while reducing the burden on hardware resources. Sustainable web development offers scaling and wide-reaching advantages.

Goals include:

Benefits include:

Plain language summary of Web Development
  • Optimize your project by eliminating unnecessary or duplicate code.
  • Develop your project to sustainably meet the needs of your audience.
  • Assess the necessity and quality of third-party services, dependencies, and first-party code.
  • Eliminate incorrect code, blocking events, form errors, security issues, and outdated code.
  • Design interfaces to be responsive, and adaptable to different devices and user preferences.
  • Include useful files expected by browsers, search engines, and other services.
  • Use the latest version of tools and software and use native features where able.

Set goals based on performance and energy impact

Success Criterion: Performance goals

Machine-testable and Resources

Set clear goals with performance and environmental impact in mind, then meet them. These could include, the number of requests or elements that must be rendered.

Success Criterion: Energy intensity

Machine-testable and Resources

Consider differences in the energy intensity or testable impact across each component. For example, unstyled text is less computationally intensive to render than CSS, which in turn is less process-heavy than JavaScript, which is less resource-heavy than WebGL or 4K video.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Performance is a key part of the sustainability mindset as reductions in loading times can have a considerable impact on energy loads within CPU, GPU, RAM, and hard drive caching (among other variables), as such ensuring a performant product is essential.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: Page speed and web performance are confirmed ranking factors when it comes to SEO. A faster digital product or service may support an organization's efforts to rank higher on search engines. Combined with the better on-page user experience, this can lead to improved conversion rates.
  • Environment: Limiting the number of server requests and the DOM size lessens the negative environmental impact of a product or service' by reducing CPU and GPU cycles and RAM usage. This brings down energy consumption, and reduces the need to recharge portable devices as frequently.
  • Performance: Reducing the hardware load improves overall performance. Devices are less likely to be overloaded or hit their limits with reduced resources.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

KPIs, Networking, Performance, Research, Social Equity, Strategy

Remove unnecessary or redundant information

Success Criterion: Minified code

Machine-testable and Resources

Remove unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other non-essential characters from code and data files to reduce file sizes and improve loading times. This applies to HTML, CSS, JavaScript, JSON, SVG, and other relevant file types.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Minifying code is essential for creating efficient, performant, and sustainable web applications. Smaller codebases translate to faster load times, reduced bandwidth consumption, and easier maintenance. This principle applies to both front-end (client-side) and back-end (server-side) code, though the specific techniques may differ. Code should not be minified in not-for-production developer visible situations.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Conversion: Faster page speeds improve user experience across the board. This makes visitors less likely to abandon their journey or search for their information elsewhere.
  • Performance: Less data transferred means reduced loading times. Whitespace itself is ignored by rendering engines, meaning the client-side impact is minimal. However, reducing data transfer has a positive impact.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								!function(e,t){"use strict";"object"==typeof module&&"object"==typeof module.exports?module.exports=e.document?t(e,!0):function(e){if(!e.document)throw new Error("jQuery requires a window with a document");return t(e)}:t(e)}("undefined"!=typeof window?window:this,function(g,e){"use strict";var t=[],r=Object.getPrototypeOf,s=t.slice,v=t.flat?function(e){return t.flat.call(e)}:function(e){return t.concat.apply([],e)},u=t.push,i=t.indexOf
							

Tags

CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Performance

Modularize bandwidth-heavy components

Success Criterion: Code splitting

Machine-testable and Resources

Break down bandwidth-heavy components into smaller, modular segments that can be loaded only when required. This applies to both front-end and back-end code.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

This approach is applicable across various programming languages and platforms, both client-side and server-side. By modularizing code and assets, you can ensure faster load times, better resource management, reduce redundancy, and improved scalability for your application. Additionally, reducing unnecessary data transfer and optimizing load times can contribute to more energy-efficient operations, helping to lower the environmental impact, improve the UX of your web application or service.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Conversion: Modularizing code can accelerate performance, improving user experience while reducing the chance of abandonment. This is especially impact for users of low-resource devices, such as handhelds.
  • Economic: Reducing the size of large files will reduce bandwidth expenses for service providers.
  • Performance: Using smaller, modular components allows for more effective caching of commonly those reused components, while loading functions only when required reduces the payload. Unused portions of a larger resource will not be downloaded, which can have a considerable impact.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

							link.addEventListener("click", (e) => {
								e.preventDefault();
								import("/modules/my-module.js")
								.then((module) => {
									/* Do something */
								})
								.catch((err) => {
									console.error(err.message);
								});
							});
							

Tags

CSS, JavaScript, Performance

Remove unnecessary code

Success Criterion: Remove redundancy

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify and eliminate unused and dead code, commonly within CSS and JavaScript.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Often when coding, projects can accumulate clutter and functions that are no longer used (due to newer, more effective features being developed). By utilizing tree shaking techniques, all the "dead wood" will be automatically dropped upon compilation, reducing a file's size.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Eliminating unused code means reducing maintenance work and expense. It can otherwise affect other code' or add unnecessary complexity.
  • Environment: Removing unused code eliminates wasted bytes, reducing download size and potentially improving rendering time.
  • Performance: Reducing downloaded code that otherwise offers no benefit to visitors frees up cache and RAM resources on their devices, while saving time.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								export function read(props) { return props.book }
								import { read } from 'utilities';
								eventHandler = (e) => { read({ book: e.target.value })}
							

Tags

CSS, JavaScript, Performance

Avoid redundancy and duplication in code

Success Criterion: Remove or simplify

Human-testable and Resources

Remove duplication and/or simplify and optimize your code for better performance, focusing on essential features so you have a cleaner, less redundant product and codebase.

Success Criterion: Iteration over recreation

Human-testable and Resources

Improve existing solutions rather than redeveloping and redesigning products from scratch, since the latter would duplicate the coding effort and maintenance burden for developers rather than reduce the learning burden for visitors.

Success Criterion: Organize code arrangement

Machine-testable and Resources

Use organization methodology and systems such as DRY or WET to optimize the arrangement and output of your JavaScript and CSS.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Redundancy is the enemy of sustainability. Having systems in place to ensure that everyone can work from established patterns, the website or application remains clean and easy to use, and iteration over redesign is firmly in the mindset that will help promote sustainable practices. It's also worth being wary of abstracting code too early (see AHA methodology) or incorrectly, as while good abstractions can be more efficient, poor ones can waste effort and introduce complexity, bloat, and bugs to your codebase which can lead to emissions.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Following naming conventions used in methodologies can be easier for developers with accessibility needs to follow and use compared to generic selector identifiers.
  • Economic: Using an optimized and reusable codebase can enhance productivity and code quality leading to a better return on investment.
  • Environment: Integrating certain methodologies can add code to your markup, but they also improve maintainability. This reduces development time at scale, and could reduce energy consumption as developers optimized workflows will reduce the time and energy spent on tasks.
  • Performance: Avoiding repetitive code reduces waste in markup, which reduces the time it takes to download site data. This also reduces server-side impact.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								.opinions_box {
									margin: 0 0 8px 0;
									text-align: center;
									&__view-more {
										text-decoration: underline;
									}
									&__text-input {
										border: 1px solid #ccc;
									}
									&--is-inactive {
										color: gray;
									}
								}
							

Tags

CSS, JavaScript, Patterns, Performance

Give third parties the same priority as first parties during assessment

Success Criterion: Assess and reduce

Machine-testable and Resources

Assess third-party content and/or services (including plugins, widgets, feeds, maps, carousels, tracking scripts, and more) as early as possible in the ideation or creation process. Use as few as possible, preferring lighter, less complex solutions to reduce the overall environmental impact, including Scope 3 emissions.

Success Criterion: Third-party implementation

Machine-testable and Resources

Use click-to-load triggers based on an import on interaction pattern to prevent automatic loading of third-party content and/or services (see above). Offer suitable alternatives to third-party use, for example, a link to a contact form as an alternative to a chat widget.

Success Criterion: Libraries and frameworks

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid using large libraries and frameworks. Integrate these only when unable to use a more performant alternative to achieve the same goal.

Success Criterion: Self-hosting

Machine-testable and Resources

Prioritize self-hosted content over embedding content from third-party services.

Success Criterion: Avoid dependencies

Machine-testable and Resources

Host icons and widgets on your own server, rather than relying on third-party services to host and deliver these or embed third-party functionality within your project.

Success Criterion: Third-party preferences

Machine-testable and Resources

Respect user preferences around the use of third-party products and services, similar to the implementation of cookie consent modals. Provide mechanisms to disable or refuse non-first-party features alongside explanations of their purpose unless it is possible to show these third-party features are critical for functionality.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Whether advertising, chatbots, maps, or other tooling; outsourcing your service to a third-party provider may be potentially useful in certain scenarios in reducing design or development time and redundancy (which can be a win for sustainability). Third-party services, however, come with issues, such as the lack of control over emissions, and they often can potentially suffer from latency and large file sizes which may not exist if you self-hosted or created the material.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Environment: Replacing heavy tooling and third-party services with lightweight tooling reduces visitor bandwidth usage and compute impact. It does require learning a new way of doing things or reducing the visibility of impactful features until they are requested. It can significantly reduce a page's overall 'environmental impact, including the data you have no control over. This is especially relevant when calculating Scope 3 emissions.
  • Performance: Self-hosting fully self-contained services, features, and content are more performant by design. They avoid additional server and rendering requests or other complications associated with third-party content. You can choose to only include the required features , further reducing overall bandwidth usage and associated emissions.
  • Privacy: Choosing not to embed and automatically load third-party content may be perceived as a privacy benefit by privacy-conscious visitors, because this reduces opportunities for their visitor data to be exploited.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Example

								<iframe src="https://example.com" loading="lazy" width="600" height="400"></iframe>
							

Tags

JavaScript, Performance, Privacy, Security, Software, UI, Usability

Ensure code follows good semantic practices

Success Criterion: Semantic code

Machine-testable and Resources

Use accurate markup according to the relevant standard(s).

Success Criterion: Optional features

Machine-testable and Resources

Remove optional HTML elements, attribute quotes, and default attributes only when they do not negatively impact functionality, accessibility, or readability. Retain them when they enhance accessibility, maintain clarity without compromising on performance, or ensure consistent browser rendering.

Success Criterion: Non-standard code

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid using non-standard HTML elements or attributes.

Success Criterion: Custom code

Human-testable and Resources

Prioritize the use of standard HTML elements and attributes. Only use custom elements or Web Components if you cannot use native elements or if you require them for the purposes of producing reusable design system components.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

HTML semantics are important. They don't just play a key role in making the Web look the way it does, they have a function in accessibility, SEO, and even in sustainability. Ensuring that you markup your content correctly and avoid cluttering your markup wastefully will reduce emissions.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Applying semantic approaches means your content will be easier to navigate via assistive technologies and keyboard. Many tags phave native semantics, reducing the need for additional tagging. This can also help technologies to better understand your content. better.
  • Conversion: Ensuring your code is efficient and works reduces the risk of broken features and visitors giving up.
  • Economic: Conforming to accessibility legislation and regulations avoid lawsuits and fines.
  • Environment: Following standards ensures users have a coherent experience - reducing bugs, saving time spent fixing bugs, and avoiding wasted resources. Bloated markup can otherwise lead to waste data, while broken markup can even trigger memory leaks.
  • Performance: Clean, modern code renders better than deprecated or poorly maintained code. While Web Components do outperform framework components, they cannot outperform the native elements they are built on.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								<header></header>
								<section>
								<article>
									<figure>
										<img>
										<figcaption></figcaption>
									</figure>
								</article>
								</section>
								<footer></footer>
							

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, Content, HTML, Social Equity, Usability

Defer the loading of non-critical resources

Success Criterion: Asynchronous code

Machine-testable and Resources

Defer loading of non-essential external assets or set these to load asynchronously to avoid a Flash Of Unstyled Content (FOUC).

Success Criterion: Optimized loading

Machine-testable and Resources

Where external resources are required to be used upon the documents load, optimize loading using resource and priority hints.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The ability to work around render-blocking issues is a great addition to the web. From deferring code, to lazy loading, to asynchronous loading, each has its use case and each can have the potential to reduce or give performance benefits to a website or application.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: If data is not loaded unless needed, you will reduce your server's bandwidth use.
  • Environment: Lazy loading videos and images so that they are only loaded once required by the visitor. This reduces transferred data and the required processing power.
  • Performance: Allowing text to render first make the user feel that everything is loading faster while, as the remaining content loads in the background or on demand.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								<img src="image.png" loading="lazy" alt="…" width="200" height="200">
							

Tags

Assets, CSS, JavaScript, Performance

Provide information to help understand the usefulness of a page

Success Criterion: Metadata and microdata

Machine-testable and Resources

Optimize and only include suitable metadata and microdata.

Success Criterion: Search engines

Machine-testable and Resources

Permit appropriate access to search engines while blocking unsustainable robots and scripts.

Success Criterion: Accessibility aids

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide accessibility and usability aids, such as skip links and signposts, to help users find and navigate content.

Additional information

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Intent

Helping visitors avoid wasting their time can reduce the number of emissions from time spent in front of a screen. As such, by using existing technologies like metadata, robots.txt files, and accessibility-friendly aids within the page, improvements to the experience can be made.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Including skip links and other accessibility aids can accelerate the user journey, reducing system resources required and allowing them to find the content they need.
  • Conversion: Providing clearly navigable structures and sitemaps ensure search engines are better able to index content.
  • Economic: Enabling quicker visits that complete the visitor's objective can help to encourage return visits.
  • Environment: Reducing the time people spend searching for the information they want and aiding them on their journey will reduce energy use, including battery drain.
  • Social Equity: Allowing users to achieve objectives faster reduces resource consumption while potentially enhancing visitor health and well-being.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
								<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
									<url>
										<loc>https://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
										<lastmod>2022-06-04</lastmod>
									</url>
								</urlset>
							

Tags

Accessibility, HTML, Marketing, UI, Usability

Validate form errors and account for tooling requirements

Success Criterion: Error validation

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify errors through live validation and with feedback on submission.

Success Criterion: Label elements

Machine-testable and Resources

Clearly label and identify required elements to ensure easy recognition for visitors using assistive technologies. Remove any unnecessary optional elements.

Success Criterion: Allow clipboard

Machine-testable and Resources

Always allow the copying and pasting of content (including passwords) from external sources.

Additional information

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Intent

Entering information on a page can lead to problems. If a visitor makes a mistake along the way, it makes good sense to have systems in place to guide them through resolving the typos, confusion, and glitches that can occur which lead to abandonment and extra emissions through wasted device usage.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Fixing issues immediately and keeping people in the process can help to prevent abandonment.
  • Performance: Enabling visitors to fill in forms more efficiently and avoid navigating back to where they were or refilling data on forms can increase the speed of necessary form filing and reduce errors in completion.
  • Security: Allowing people to correct input errors, verify their input prior to submission, and identifying errors early in the process can help to prevent costly data protection mistakes.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								<label for="username">Username: (3-16 characters)</label>
								<input name="username" type="text" value="Sasha" pattern="\w{3,16}" required>
								<label for="pin">PIN: (4 digits)</label>
								<input name="pin" type="password" pattern="\d{4,4}" required>
							

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, HTML, Security, UI, Usability

Structure metadata for machine readability

Success Criterion: Required elements

Machine-testable and Resources

Include the required title element, plus any beneficial optional HTML head elements.

Success Criterion: Meta tags

Machine-testable and Resources

Include necessary meta tag references that are commonly recognized and used by user agents such as search engines. Follow recognized standards and vocabularies such as Friend of a Friend (FOAF) or RDFa.

Success Criterion: Structured data

Machine-testable and Resources

Use microdata, structured data (e.g., Schema.org), or microformats in content where a widely used structured data format exists.

Additional information

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Intent

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.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Improving metadata can make it easier for search engines, social networks, or other platforms to present your content appropriately. This can lead to better search engine visibility, more visitors, and potentially better conversion.
  • Performance: Providing third-party tools and search engines with the information they need can direct people more quickly to the content they need.
  • Transparency: Metadata ensures clients find the correct content fast. If users only require something basic, such as contact details, they may not even have to view the content directly - saving bandwidth.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								<html>
									<head>
										<title>Example: A website about Examples</title>
										<script type="application/ld+json">
										{
											"@context" : "https://schema.org",
											"@type" : "WebSite",
											"name" : "Example",
											"url" : "https://example.com/"
										}
									</script>
									</head>
									<body>
									</body>
								</html>
							

Tags

Accessibility, HTML, Marketing, Usability

Use sustainability beneficial user preference media queries

Success Criterion: Media and preference queries

Machine-testable and Resources

Accommodate common user preferences, such as prefers-color-scheme, with corresponding CSS media queries. Consider accounting for additional user preferences, including monochrome, prefers-contrast, prefers-reduced-data, prefers-reduced-transparency, and prefers-reduced-motion preference queries where these will benefit your users. Use print and scripting media queries when they can improve sustainability.

Additional information

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Intent

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.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Having a high contrast version of a site will reduce barriers to entry and time wasted for visually impaired visitors. Reduced motion can also accommodate other accessibility requirements.
  • Conversion: Delivering better user experience by meeting their preferences can improve conversion and encourage repeat visits.
  • Economic: Using print media queries within stylesheets can reduce visitors' ink use and paper costs.
  • Environment: Accommodating dark mode when preferred will always be more energy efficient on OLED devices. Similarly, animation and media have a significant impact on CPU and GPU usage, so respecting a prefers reduced motion query will reduce energy consumption. The presence of a monochrome preference query could encourage greater adoption of energy-efficient e-ink devices. A sustainability-optimized print stylesheet can save both paper and ink output.
  • Performance: Allowing visitors to access a reduced-data version of a site could significantly reduce the data transferred and the resulting carbon footprint. This can improve performance and reduce costs for individuals on a metered data plan. Detecting if scripting is disabled and offering alternative content may save wasted effort and improve the performance of a project.
  • Social Equity: Meeting visitor preferences is a positive shift: You aren't telling your visitors how they should 'experience your content, but following your visitors' preferences or a device' capabilities and the priority of constituencies.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								@media (prefers-color-scheme: dark) {
									/* wants dark mode */
								}
								@media (prefers-color-scheme: light) {
									/* wants light mode */
								}
							

Tags

Accessibility, Assets, CSS, UI, Usability

Ensure layouts work for different devices and requirements

Success Criterion: Device-adaptable

Machine-testable and Resources

Allow your project to work and adapt seamlessly across a variety of devices and screen sizes, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, desktop computers, smart TVs, and other emerging platforms. This ensures that content and functionality can be easily accessed and are suitably optimized for display on both smaller mobile devices and larger displays without limiting accessibility, usability, or design features on any specific device type. Implement robust fallback strategies to ensure that the digital product or service will not fail if it encounters unsupported technologies.

Success Criterion: Progressive enhancement

Machine-testable and Resources

Use progressive enhancement to enhance overall sustainability. This can involve a single approach or a careful combination, such as adaptive design, mobile-first design, or dynamic serving.

Success Criterion: Carbon-aware design

Machine-testable and Resources

Use carbon-aware design techniques to maximize your use of renewable energy. This is achieved by adapting the delivery of your project to current electricity availability and visitor grid load. This should include using situational design to reduce the codebase and disable non-essential functionality during high-intensity periods. Similarly, it should be possible to adapt the user interface to perform better with reduced hardware resources, where this measure can be taken to avoid scaling hardware resources and the resultant increase in emissions. It can also include designing algorithms that can automatically disable features based on set thresholds.

Success Criterion: Alternative browsing

Machine-testable and Resources

Support additional indirect methods of interaction, such as voice (speech), code (QR, etc.), reader view (browser, application, or RSS), or connected technologies (watch, appliance, transport, etc.).

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Intent

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. A Device-Adaptable approach goal is to provide a consistent, adaptable experience across a full range of devices by considering all screen sizes and resolutions from the start, rather than primarily focusing on mobile scaling upward.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Incorporating large, touch-friendly buttons, simplified navigation menus, and clear readable fonts on your mobile websites can make it easier for individuals with visual or motor impairments to interact with your content. A device-adaptable strategy that considers the limitations of each approach helps to maximize accessibility and usability across all devices, enhancing accessibility and optimizing experience.
  • Conversion: Broadening the compatibility of your products and services can equally broaden their appeal and use, even in scenarios you may not have originally envisaged.
  • Economic: Ensuring your website or application works well on desktop devices, smartphones, and other resolutions alike can provide a financial benefit by enabling individuals to make purchases wherever and whenever it suits them.
  • Social Equity: Ensuring content works well on older and low-powered devices is important, as these are more frequently used in developing nations.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								@media screen and (min-width: 600px) {
									body {
										color: red;
									}
								}
							

Tags

Compatibility, CSS, Performance, UI, Usability

Use Standards-based JavaScript and APIs

Success Criterion: Sustainable JavaScript

Machine-testable and Resources

Improve sustainability through accessible and performant code.

Success Criterion: Sustainable APIs

Machine-testable and Resources

Integrate energy-relevant APIs - such as Battery Status, Compression Streams, Page Visibility, or Vibration - where these can reduce energy consumption.

Success Criterion: API requests

Human-testable and Resources

Call client- or server-side APIs only when necessary. Equally, ensure an API is optimized to only send data that is actually required.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

When new best practices or if beneficial scripting guidance exists that will improve the visitor experience, following it should be of the highest priority (only using scripts ethically should be promoted).

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: Creating fallbacks for technology that might fail can 'enable sales you'd otherwise miss out on.
  • Economic: Providing easier, reliable access in more situations allows you to sell to more people.
  • Environment: Reducing unnecessary visual effects - such as animations - when a page is not visible, helps to prevent wasted processing in background tabs. This can potentially help visitors who leave multiple tabs open conserve battery.
  • Performance: Using low-impact scripting can reduce heavy codebase sizes. Providing fallbacks for unavailable JavaScript ensures older or less capable devices can still access your content.
  • Privacy: Allowing script-free visitors to easily access your content can protect the privacy of visitors with increased privacy needs.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Example

									const audio = document.querySelector("audio");
									// Handle page visibility change:
									// - If the page is hidden, pause the video
									// - If the page is shown, play the video
									document.addEventListener("visibilitychange", () => {
									if (document.hidden) {
										audio.pause();
									} else {
										audio.play();
									}
									});
							

Tags

Accessibility, JavaScript, Security

Ensure that your code is secure

Success Criterion: Code security

Machine-testable and Resources

Check scripts and associated code for vulnerabilities, exploits, header issues, and code injection.

Additional information

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Intent

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.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Preventing security issues ahead of time c protects you and your visitors from financial crime.
  • Environment: Securing your project against threats and closing vulnerabilities makes them a less likely target for individuals who might exploit them, consuming vast amounts of data in the process.
  • Performance: Protecting your project against breaches reduces your risk of large amounts of data being stolen, corrupted, or destroyed.
  • Security: Maintaining security helps to maintain trust and prevent personal information from being exposed and exploited.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

JavaScript, Privacy, Security, Social Equity

Use dependencies appropriately and ensure maintenance

Success Criterion: Dependency management

Machine-testable and Resources

Prevent developers from downloading and installing libraries and frameworks to run client-side when they are not needed by checking for unused dependencies. Follow up by uninstalling those that aren't needed.

Success Criterion: Dependency necessity

Machine-testable and Resources

Limit your use of libraries and frameworks to the genuinely necessary as this will reduce the amount of code that has to be downloaded and parsed by the browser. Consider whether you can use vanilla code instead. Check the package size and whether individual modules can be installed and imported individually, as opposed to the entire library.

Success Criterion: Dependency updates

Machine-testable and Resources

Regularly check dependencies and keep them up to date.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

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.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Environment: Removing code packages developers or users do not need reduces wasted energy during rendering.
  • Performance: Reducing client-side JavaScript reduces rendering time and ensures a faster, smoother user experience.
  • Security: Keeping packages up-to-date and using fewer third-party libraries reduces the likelihood of security vulnerabilities.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								npm uninstall 
							

Tags

JavaScript, Patterns, Performance, Security, Software

Include expected and beneficial files

Success Criterion: Expected files

Machine-testable and Resources

Include favicon.ico, robots.txt, opensearch.xml, site.webmanifest, and sitemap.xml files by default. Also ensure that any similar files defined in future web standards or specifications are included.

Success Criterion: Beneficial files

Machine-testable and Resources

Include beneficial files such as ads.txt, carbon.txt, humans.txt, security.txt. Also ensure that any similar files defined in future web standards or specifications are included.

Additional information

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Intent

Websites should include a range of expected and standard beneficial files to improve search engine optimization, user experience, transparency, and overall site health. Search engines and browsers regularly request these files by default. If they don't exist, this leads to unnecessary requests, potential errors, and increased emissions. Including these files avoids these issues while also providing SEO, user experience, and other benefits. They each have a low carbon footprint, so while they do create emissions, it's worth including them for the benefits they provide.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Integrating expected files enables the browser''s default search box to search a service, replacing any custom solution. This can increase accessibility as it encourages the use of a browser-native component and/or keyboard shortcuts, which can often better meet accessibility requirements.
  • Conversion: Configuring robots.txt appropriately can help to ensure content is correctly indexed and users are better guided to appropriate content on your project.
  • Economic: Including robots.txt and sitemap files helps search engines to discover and index your website. This can lead to more visitors and potentially more customers. The ads.txt file may reduce advertising fraud and could similarly benefit your business.
  • Environment: Providing files expected by search engines or browsers will reduce loading errors and may improve efficiency in how visitors find or interact with a site. Plain text requires no rendering. If visitors or search engines are able to find these files, such as carbon.txt, they can load more quickly and with less CPU/GPU impact than any formatted webpage.
  • Performance: Satisfying requests for expected files improves interactions with search engines or browsers requesting them, while also potentially avoiding additional requests once they are discovered. Plain text files contain no links, no markup, and has a low rendering impact. Including details such as site credits in such a file will reduce data transfer and have a lower rendering footprint.
  • Transparency: Providing a humans.txt file allows you to credit the people involved in the creation process, while security.txt provides critical points of contact if an issue is discovered. Both increase transparency.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								User-agent: *
								Disallow: /cgi-bin/
							

Tags

Assets, Compatibility, Marketing, Patterns, Security, UI

Avoid using deprecated, proprietary, or outdated code

Success Criterion: Preferred code

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid using deprecated, proprietary, or outdated formats and web standards. Always adopt up-to-date, widely recognized standards. Only use deprecated, proprietary, or outdated code where this is required to meet a documented customer need and if there is a justifiable benefit that cannot otherwise be met. Justifiable reasons could include compatibility with essential legacy systems and/or hardware, accessibility, or emissions reduction. Use polyfills only when necessary, and regularly audit code to see if they can be removed.

Additional information

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Intent

The web is full of outdated or deprecated formats and web standards, and proprietary (non-standard custom) features that have been superseded. By adhering to up-to-date and widely recognized formats and web standards, developers can ensure better compatibility, user experience, and lower environmental impact.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Using modern web standards helps to ensure better support in assistive technologies.
  • Environment: Avoiding deprecated standards ensures your code is optimized for and supported by modern browsers, ensuring full functionality and a smooth experience. This helps to reduce browsing time and associated energy use.
  • Performance: Moving on from deprecated or less efficient standards increases the longevity of your digital product or service and reduces the need for a carbon-intensive redesign.
  • Security: Keeping up with modern standards reduces the risk of security exploits.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Performance

Use the most efficient solution for your service

Success Criterion: Identify requirements

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify the requirements and use this as a basis to help you select the most appropriate implementation for your project. A simpler technological implementation may use more human resources but could have a smaller footprint. A prebuilt solution may use more system resources and have a bigger emissions impact on render, but it could have a faster build time - meaning less carbon is emitted in development.

Success Criterion: Optimized methodology

Human-testable and Resources

Use the most effective approach for your use case. Most of the time, coding from scratch will often provide the most performant results. Where an existing solution is present and is being actively maintained, this may be better optimized than what you can reasonably produce yourself. Favor native components and file systems over WYSIWYG editors - including visual page builders - or other heavy frameworks. Be mindful of the impact of third-party solutions.

Success Criterion: Static over dynamic

Human-testable and Resources

Deliver static in place of dynamic content wherever possible. If you choose to use a code generation tool, then favor the most efficient tool available, such as Static Site Generators (SSGs). Content delivered by a dynamic CMS will involve much more server-side processing and uses bulkier libraries.

Success Criterion: Extensions and plugins

Machine-testable and Resources

Carefully select and review plugins, extensions, and themes to maximize interoperability, accessibility, and performance. Audit these regularly over time to ensure continued compatibility.

Success Criterion: Interface components

Human-testable and Resources

Pay particular attention to user interface components with respect to their sustainability impact.

Additional information

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Intent

Every product or service is different, and each will require a different set of tooling to accomplish the most sustainable result. Deciding whether to go with a bulky framework, Static Site Generator (SSG), or a Content Management System (CMS) takes careful planning based on client or service requirements.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Making assistive technologies a core part of project specifications from the very start and throughout a product or service''s lifecycle improves access for people with disabilities.
  • Economic: Avoiding tooling at risk of overburdening user experience may result in financial savings, especially if tooling has associated maintenance expenses, licensing fees, or subscription costs.
  • Environment: Evaluating long-term technology implications and taking the time to ensure they are optimized and efficiently utilized helps a team measurably reduce the environmental impact of a product or service.
  • Performance: Reducing complexity in your infrastructure will increase developer productivity, while also reducing overhead. This further reduces emissions.
  • Privacy: Prioritizing security and user privacy helps an organization better comply with current and emerging legislation.
  • Security: Maintaining a software product and restricting your use of third-party solutions to the essential will improve overall security.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Compatibility, Ideation, Performance, Software, Strategy

Use the latest stable language version

Success Criterion: Versioning

Machine-testable and Resources

Use the latest build of your chosen syntax language and its coupled framework.

Success Criterion: Language choice

Human-testable and Resources

Use the most appropriate programming language for the task. Many tools and programming languages are optimized for the performance of particular tasks. Applying the most appropriate tools to the problem can justify any time or effort involved in their adoption, especially if there is a reasonable user base, provided it does not impact the wellbeing of those involved or risk becoming cost-prohibitive.

Additional information

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Intent

Languages evolve regularly, and it's important for security and performance reasons to keep on top of the technology stack you are using. It's also important to consider whether the language you are using is appropriate or optimized for the task you wish to use it for.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Using the latest and more performant language version can help hosting companies to reduce their costs. That could be beneficial for the company and customers alike.
  • Environment: Using the latest language version can improve efficiency and reduce data center energy consumption. Although do verify that benefits are worthwhile before major build upgrades.
  • Performance: Updating the language version will often offer performance improvements. Compiled languages, such as C or Rust, can have greatly reduced execution times and energy usage for algorthims compared to the same algorithms written in interpreted languages, such as Python or JavaScript.
  • Security: Maintaining update and upgrade schedules is good for security, allowing you to reduce the risk of security vulnerabilities in older versions.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Compatibility, Performance, Security

Take advantage of native features and functionality

Success Criterion: Native over custom

Machine-testable and Resources

Use native functions, APIs, and features over writing your own.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Ensuring that your code is free of redundancy by using pre-existing functionality provided by the web browser is important as it will help you to reduce the amount of time wasted, re-creating the same components, this offers obvious sustainability benefits in terms of time in front of the screen.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Using existing features means you do not need to invest more time in 'development or maintenance, which reduces costs.
  • Environment: Avoiding repetition of pre-existing features improves efficiency, which ultimately will reduce redundancy, development time, and emissions associated with building the product or service.
  • Performance: Using browser-native functionality and features allows you to take advantage of their natural optimization. They will generally load faster while using fewer resources. Custom components are unlikely to beat their performance.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								<button onclick="window.dialog.showModal();">open dialog</button>
								<dialog id="dialog">
									<p>I'm a dialog.</p>
									<form method="dialog">
										<button>Close</button>
									</form>
								</dialog>
							

Tags

Compatibility, CSS, HTML, JavaScript, Patterns, UI

Reduce the number and complexity of database queries

Success Criterion: Database queries

Human-testable and Resources

Optimize database queries, especially for frequently accessed information. If you need information that is stored in a database, and you require it or it is likely to be requested more than once in your code, the database should only be accessed once and the data stored locally for subsequent processing. Avoid relying on framework helpers that might defer filtering to later in the process.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Making multiple requests whether HTTP or within a database has a carbon cost as infrastructure has to send that information back and forth. As such, managing how you store and use data locally for a visitor will help reduce wasted cycles.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Optimizing the codebase to avoid pushing multiple additional demands to the server reduces bandwidth overheads, while also reducing the risk of stress failures and lost business.
  • Environment: Filtering out unneeded data at a deeper level of the application can reduce energy usage, as it reduces the processing required for (de)serialization.
  • Performance: Holding the data locally rather than remotely eliminates the need to wait for additional requests to process the query. Relational databases and other specialist data stores are usually heavily optimized for data filtering and retrieval. Performing transformations at this level of the application creduces processing time and delivers responses faster.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								$value = get_post_meta( int $post_id, string $key = '', bool $single = false ): mixed
							

Tags

Networking, Performance

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    User Experience Design
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    Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems

Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems

Even data has a home. Whether you are developing tools, processing data, maintaining online systems, operating websites or something else - conscious choices in this area can have an enormous impact.

Sustainable or green web hosting, infrastructure, and systems covers the energy our data centers use, but it ultimately goes much further: It is also about where and what data is processed or stored and the technologies used. Conscious provisioning choices and best practices can improve both sustainability and operational efficiency.

Goals include:

Benefits include:

Plain language summary of Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems
  • Select a green hosting provider with a scalable plan that meets your requirements, in the location where you need it.
  • Optimize your files, while ensuring appropriate file-related caching and error handling.
  • Automate processes and services where and when able.
  • Manage the processing and storage of data with care.
  • Monitor the sustainability impact of projects using metrics.

Choose a sustainable service provider

Success Criterion: Monitor Metrics

Machine-testable and Resources

Monitor key indicators to assess and transparently report the environmental impact of hosting and identify overconsumption. These include energy and water usage, but also hardware factors, such as CPU usage and memory usage. Similarly, track the allocation of servers and CPU cores to optimize resource efficiency. Consumers should monitor and providers should both calculate and transparently share, environmental impact metrics. Metrics should include Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE), Water Usage Effectiveness (WUE), and Carbon Usage Effectiveness (CUE).

Success Criterion: Equipment longevity

Human-testable and Resources

Maintain hardware to extend its lifespan as long as possible. Use it efficiently at an appropriate capacity, and ensuring it has the necessary certifications. New purchases should be from reliable long-lifespan suppliers.

Success Criterion: E-waste management

Human-testable and Resources

Responsibly recycle or upcycle unwanted waste. Materials should be recovered and reused, where possible, or otherwise disposed of appropriately.

Success Criterion: Renewable electricity

Machine-testable and Resources

Use electricity with the lowest possible carbon intensity. Examine location-based emissions factors to calculate the carbon intensity of available electricity from the regional grid. Include the impact of on-site electricity generation, including backup generators, in calculations.

Success Criterion: Remaining emissions

Human-testable and Resources

Balance unavoidable remaining carbon emissions with high-quality market based instruments or other evolving instruments from the voluntary carbon market, until additional renewable energy resources become available. The quality of market-based instruments should be verified by non-profit third-party organizations with sufficient supporting evidence.

Success Criterion: Domain names

Machine-testable and Resources

The impact of domain names is disclosed by registries and registrars, and registrants consider and (where possible) mitigate against these environmental issues.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

In addition to reducing the environmental impacts of a website, choose a hosting service that mitigates the remaining impacts. There are both hardware and software variables to consider, including virtual and real world impacts that need to be measured (and can result in beneficial outcomes if reduced).

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: In cases where a badge or link about sustainable hosting providers appears on a website, visitors concerned about the issue may use and reuse the site preferentially.
  • Environment: Using hosting providers that operate with lower emissions, better power efficiency, and more responsible electronic waste management reduces negative environmental impacts from websites and products.
  • Social Equity: Hosting providers with transparent environmental sustainability are minimizing the negative impacts on their local communities.
  • Transparency: Sharing the efficiency and renewable energy metrics of hosting services allows the public to verify and understand sustainable websites and products.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

E-Waste, Hardware, Networking, Social Equity

Optimize caching with offline access supported

Success Criterion: Utilize caching

Machine-testable and Resources

Use server-side caching where possible to reduce processing time and repeated database lookups or API calls. Configure caching via server settings to control file-type expiration using appropriate headers, such as Expires or Cache-Control. Cache dynamic page responses where possible to serve static versions to future users. Support client-side caching of frequently used static assets to minimize repeat server requests.

Success Criterion: Offline access

Machine-testable and Resources

Ensure resources remain available and accessible even if the user is disconnected, using methods such as JavaScript Service Workers, Web Workers, and browser local storage features. Client-side JavaScript uses a combination of ServiceWorkers, WebWorkers, storage Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), or cookies (if necessary) to streamline the user-journey. For example, through the use of a PWA (Progressive Web Application) to ensure that an offline version is available and accessible at all times to reduce inequality and improve accessibility.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Browser caching reduces the requirement for files to need to be constantly reloaded from the server, and in certain situations, it can even allow for files to be viewed offline (or in the case of a reverse proxy, send immediate recurring requests without additional calculation or computation from the server). As such, this will have sustainability and performance benefits (for instance by greatly reducing Time-To-First-Byte).

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Economic: Bandwidth to serve visitors cost money and reducing the amount of data transfer saves money.
  • Environment: Caching enables websites to deliver content without unnecessary server requests, sparing the carbon emissions driven by networks and the data center.
  • Performance: Enabling browser caching can reduce page reload speeds for return visitors and deliver better website performance.
  • Social Equity: Optimizing browser caching often enables visitors to view content when their network connection has failed or when they must use a low quality network.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Example

								<IfModule mod_expires.c>
									ExpiresActive on
									# Default: Fallback
									ExpiresDefault                                      "access plus 1 year"
									# Specific: Assets
									ExpiresByType image/x-icon                          "access plus 1 week"
									ExpiresByType application/rss+xml                   "access plus 1 hour"
									ExpiresByType application/json                      "access"
								</IfModule>
							

Tags

Assets, HTML, JavaScript, Networking, Performance, Software

Compress files where it is beneficial

Success Criterion: Server-side compression

Machine-testable and Resources

Use server-side compression to reduce file sizes before delivery. Server-side compression settings and tools can be used to compress most commonly used file types, reducing energy consumption while minimizing load times, saving bandwidth, and improving overall performance.

Success Criterion: Media compression

Machine-testable and Resources

Use media compression tools to reduce the file size of images, videos, audio, and any other media before uploading to a server.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Every file will take up a certain amount of room on a server's hard drive, and this data will need to be sent across the wire to each visitor. Doing so will consume resources, but by using compression algorithms you can shrink each file to make its journey less impactful.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Environment: Applying compression effectively reduces network demand, consequently lowering power consumption and carbon emissions.
  • Performance: Reducing data transfer volumes and data consumption delivers faster performance to all visitors.
  • Social Equity: Decreasing demand on networks enables visitors with slower network connections to enjoy the same experience and performance as users with high speed networks.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
									<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>
										<IfModule mod_headers.c>
											SetEnvIfNoCase ^(Accept-EncodXng|X-cept-Encoding|X{15}|~{15}|-{15})$ ^((gzip|deflate)\s*,?\s*)+|[X~-]{4,13}$ HAVE_Accept-Encoding
											RequestHeader append Accept-Encoding "gzip,deflate" env=HAVE_Accept-Encoding
										</IfModule>
									</IfModule>
									<IfModule mod_filter.c>
										AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE "application/atom+xml application/javascript application/json application/ld+json application/manifest+json application/rdf+xml application/rss+xml application/schema+json application/geo+json application/vnd.ms-fontobject application/wasm application/x-font-ttf application/x-javascript application/x-web-app-manifest+json application/xhtml+xml application/xml font/eot font/opentype font/otf font/ttf image/bmp image/svg+xml image/vnd.microsoft.icon image/x-icon text/cache-manifest text/calendar text/css text/html text/javascript text/plain text/markdown text/vcard text/vnd.rim.location.xloc text/vtt text/x-component text/x-cross-domain-policy text/xml"
									</IfModule>
									<IfModule mod_mime.c>
										AddEncoding gzip              svgz
									</IfModule>
								</IfModule>
							

Tags

Assets, Networking, Performance

Setup necessary error pages and redirection links

Success Criterion: Error pages

Machine-testable and Resources

Set up proper error handling and error pages to clearly inform users when something goes wrong, guide them back to useful content, and maintain a consistent, trustworthy experience.

Success Criterion: Redirection

Machine-testable and Resources

Regularly audit to check for broken and outdated links. Update these as necessary and add redirects to guide users and search engines to the correct content to ensure efficient browsing and protect SEO value. Test all redirects to ensure they function as intended and avoid impactful redirect loops. Favor the most efficient redirection system for your setup (e.g., server rules over database lookups).

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Navigation errors lead to mistakes, which lead to visitors wasting time trying to resolve them, or abandoning a website altogether. Anything that can be done to interject, predict, and way-find around potential problems will reduce emissions over time.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Error pages and appropriate redirects matter because every visitor requires appropriate assistance to find their path. Navigation and signage that successfully support individuals with cognitive disabilities to find their path deliver the best design for all visitors.
  • Conversion: Visitors who find their way out of an error quickly have a faster and more enjoyable experience that encourages return visits.
  • Economic: Every page load costs money, so minimizing erroneous page loads saves money.
  • Environment: When visitors load fewer pages on their way to desired content, a project becomes less carbon intensive.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								ErrorDocument 404 /404.html
							

Tags

Compatibility, Content, Marketing, Networking, UI, Usability

Avoid maintaining unnecessary virtualized environments or containers

Success Criterion: Unused environments

Human-testable and Resources

Minimize the number of active environments, including virtualized environments (such as containers). Audit codebases for unused branches and environments and remove them as appropriate.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Decommission or switch off additional environments, such as testing / QA (Quality Assurance) / re-production and other such environments when they are not useful.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Removing unnecessary environments reduces the resources that must be provisioned. This reduces infrastructure, maintenance, and process costs.
  • Environment: Power and energy resources will be conserved from avoiding utilizing unnecessary environments and lowering carbon emissions will result.
  • Social Equity: Scaling back the usage of data centers reduces the need for new facilities that may bring negative community impacts and strain national resources.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Hardware, Networking, Performance, Software

Use automation wisely

Success Criterion: Automate tasks

Human-testable and Resources

Automate recurring tasks, such as deployment, testing, and compilation in alignment with continuous integration and continuous delivery best practices.

Success Criterion: Qualify tasks

Human-testable and Resources

Run automated tasks only when necessary to reduce unnecessary resource utilisation.

Success Criterion: Automated scaling

Human-testable and Resources

Use automated scaling to promptly adjust server capacity up or down based on demand, ensuring efficient resource allocation. Implement buffering and throttling to manage load and maintain performance without overprovisioning.

Success Criterion: Suspicious activity filtering

Machine-testable and Resources

Restrict the activity of unwanted and unnecessary third-party crawlers, suspicious user agents, unwanted visitors, bots, and scrapers from accessing or downloading your content. Follow best practices, such as server access rules and security tools, while ensuring your content remains accessible to users, search engines and any helpful, welcome crawlers. Consider that scrapers may be used to inform and train large language models.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Any tasks, especially repetitive, that can be automated should be automated (compilation, deployment, tests, etc.) to reduce time at the computer being wasted by people.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Maximizing the number of tasks carried out rapidly by machine brings down maintenance and infrastructure costs.
  • Environment: Optimizing workflows can reduce the amount of energy used during peak periods where it may be most costly or unsustainable to run.
  • Operations: Automating repetitive tasks allows humans to focus on valuable, novel, and creative tasks that can offer greater job satisfaction and expand skills.
  • Security: Evading unwanted bots, crawlers, and similar visitors protects websites from harm and avoids potential downtime.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Performance, Security, Software

Define the frequency of data refreshes

Success Criterion: Refresh frequency

Machine-testable and Resources

Define the revalidation and refresh frequency for the cache, local data, and page content based on user needs, balancing performance, data accuracy, and resource efficiency.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Only send data from the server when the visitor needs it. As much as possible, you can rely on client-side or server-side cache and client-side / local storage. Rather than refreshing data on a given frequency, it might be up to the visitor to manually ask for a refresh.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Conversion: Eliminating unnecessary data refreshes delivers a better user experience that makes return visits more likely.
  • Economic: Caching or simply not updating data unnecessarily can potentially reduce costs by reducing the amount of data transmitted over a network.
  • Environment: Minimizing data refreshes reduces server and network usage, which brings down power consumption and carbon emissions in turn.
  • Social Equity: Reducing live data refresh rates makes it easier for people with limited or slow network access to access and use website content.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

JavaScript, Networking, Performance, Usability

Back up critical data at routine intervals

Success Criterion: Data backups

Human-testable and Resources

Ensure backups of system and user data are secure and incremental to minimize storage use, reduce backup time, and protect against data loss or breaches.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

For security reasons and in accordance with a Service-Level Agreement (SLA), it is often recommended to duplicate data to make sure it remains available if a problem occurs. This should be balanced with the cost of such duplication. Not all data is critical and, rather than overcompensating with multiple saves, duplication should be designed with efficiency in mind.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Using efficient backup processes that are automated and include only incremental changes to critical data results in less storage being used, reducing costs.
  • Environment: Designing backups as efficiently as possible minimizes power consumption and carbon emissions by eliminating excess processes and storage.
  • Performance: Ensuring the availability of critical data allows continuation or speedier resumption of service when problems occur, such as data loss or outages.
  • Security: Keeping efficient, stable, and well-protected backups is good practice, meaning work, data, and business value are not irreparably lost during a data breach.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Hardware, Performance

Consider the impact and requirements of data processing

Success Criterion: Batch processing

Human-testable and Resources

Use existing and supported carbon-aware computing methods to automate batching and scheduling according to real-time electrical grid carbon intensity data or shift workloads to lower-carbon regions to optimize sustainability while maintaining performance.

Success Criterion: Protocols

Machine-testable and Resources

Choose communication protocols appropriate to visitor needs and the type of data being transferred. Avoid insecure options such as HTTP and FTP, and prioritize secure, efficient alternatives such as HTTPS and SSH. Use modern protocols to take advantage of newer features, while maintaining backward compatibility for older devices.

Success Criterion: Event-driven architecture

Human-testable and Resources

Consider using event-driven architecture and microservices when building products with state changes that do not require full page refreshes. Favor these where they offer a more energy-efficient alternative to traditional APIs based on performance, power, and processing factors. Choose the approach that reduces server workload and environmental impact.

Success Criterion: Client vs server

Human-testable and Resources

Avoid redundant processing. When data processing is necessary, carefully compare the relative effects of client- versus server-side processing based on efficiency, performance, security, and sustainability metrics to make an informed decision.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Depending on carbon intensity, some processes and communications should be delayed and sometimes batched. Redundancy should be avoided wherever possible. This could also be a way to reduce the workload on a server or Virtual Machine (VM). In such cases, visitors should be warned that the process is asynchronous and notified when it is over.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Improving the efficiency of data processing saves money due to energy and infrastructure needs.
  • Environment: Running servers for less time reduces carbon emissions.
  • Performance: Processing data in energy efficient batches can reduce thrashing of hardware during high-intensity periods, maintaining performance stability.
  • Social Equity: Reducing data processing demand means the resources that data centres demand, and can place a strain on local communities can also be reduced.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

JavaScript, Networking, Performance

Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) appropriately

Success Criterion: Global CDNs

Machine-testable and Resources

Deploy static content, assets, and other read-only resources via a Content Delivery Network (CDN) on a case-by-case basis, where judged to be beneficial. Carefully evaluate the environmental impact of any CDN service used, similar to a web hosting provider.

Success Criterion: Sustainability commitment

Machine-testable and Resources

Select CDN providers that make commitments to sustainability and report on their progress.

Success Criterion: Local servers

Machine-testable and Resources

When serving an exclusively local audience, consider whether a CDN is required at all. Instead, select hosting providers with servers close to your target audience.

Success Criterion: Inappropriate resources

Machine-testable and Resources

Avoid deploying dynamic or frequently changing resources to a CDN. Browser behaviors such as cache partitioning and cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) can limit performance gains, hinder caching and interaction, and attempting to override these can introduce security or privacy risks. This does not apply to static assets or JSON files, which are well suited to CDN delivery.

Success Criterion: Close to the source

Human-testable and Resources

Perform data transformations, transfers, and processing between the layers of an application as close to the source as possible. This reduces unnecessary serialization overhead and avoids wasting resources.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Edge caching and CDN delivery can help optimize the sustainable delivery of digital services by optimizing how your website's traffic is transferred over the internet.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Using a CDN may save money because their data transfer rates are often cheaper than hosting providers.
  • Environment: Using a CDN to host content closer to users lowers network-related carbon emissions while also reducing user device energy use because they can load content more quickly.
  • Performance: Using a CDN to locate content closer to users gives them faster access to content.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Content, Hardware, Networking, Performance

Ensure infrastructure fits project requirements

Success Criterion: Lowest requirements

Human-testable and Resources

Select infrastructure that meets your requirements and customer agreements without over-provisioning. Favor standalone instances over multi-zone or distributed setups when requirements allow. Provision for average loads rather than peaks to ensure efficient resource use. Use autoscaling to handle fluctuations without underutilizing infrastructure.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Select infrastructure with minimal specifications meeting business requirements of performance, availability, etc.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Environment: Reducing provisioned resources reduces wasted energy and water costs, even when resources are not used to capacity.
  • Operations: Keeping a closer eye on actual and anticipated use allows an organisation to better understand its own functions and anticipate future needs.
  • Economic: Avoiding overprovisioning means avoiding unnecessary costs.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

E-Waste, Hardware, Performance

Store data according to the needs of your users

Success Criterion: Reduce redundancy

Human-testable and Resources

Regularly audit for and delete redundant, abandoned, or single-use data - often referred to as dark data - to reduce storage demand and energy use.

Success Criterion: Expiration dates

Machine-testable and Resources

Assign expiration and/or maximum retention dates to stored data where appropriate, treating excess data as a form of technical debt. Simultaneously observe any applicable minimum data retention periods. Make data cleanup an established organization-wide routine to prevent long-term data accumulation.

Success Criterion: Classify and tag

Machine-testable and Resources

Implement a data classification and tagging policy to improve visibility, simplify management, and enable efficient removal of outdated or unused data.

Success Criterion: Justify storage

Human-testable and Resources

Store data only when it cannot be easily or accurately regenerated.

Success Criterion: Optimize logging

Machine-testable and Resources

Optimize log collection and storage by scheduling backups during low-activity hours, rotating logs appropriately, and using off-site, sustainable providers.

Success Criterion: Asset downloads

Human-testable and Resources

Make large, long-term assets available for easy download in order to provide users with regular offline access without requiring persistant server resources.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Optimize storage of data according to what is most important, relevant, and required in service to visitors. This will help to avoid unnecessary storage of data that may not be useful or valuable, which will reduce required infrastructure, power, and data transfer.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Storing less data reduces the expense of operating excessively large storage and archiving systems.
  • Environment: Reducing data storage brings down the carbon emissions driven by storage system operation.
  • Security: Storing smaller amounts of data reduces the amount of data exposed to potential security issues and reduces monitoring effort.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								Accept-Encoding: zstd, gzip, br, deflate
							

Tags

Content, E-Waste, Hardware, Performance, Privacy

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    Web Development
  2. Full document
  3. Next page
    Business Strategy and Product Management

Business Strategy and Product Management

Designing websites and applications for better sustainability requires good business strategy and product management.

Anyone who owns, manages, or operates a website or application has significant capacity to improve the sustainability footprint of their organization. Business owners and other C-level executives are likely to be the main people responsible for the most impactful strategic decisions an organization can make. But all individuals working online can also make a big difference. Work in this area can improve the sustainability of various non-technical considerations that stretch beyond, or affect, a digital product or service.

Goals include:

Benefits include:

Plain language summary of Business Strategy and Product Management
  • Plan, create, and maintain policies and statements to cover sustainability initiatives.
  • Appoint someone to take responsibility for sustainability. Inform and train others.
  • Make efforts to understand your impact. Set goals and targets. Report, verify, and disclose your progress.
  • If a project is necessary, document its evolution and manage its lifespan.
  • Share benefits with your workers. Involve all relevant stakeholders in the decision-making process.
  • Be ethical in your approach to sensitive materials, including data, or emerging technologies, such as AI.
  • Be an inclusive workplace.
  • Give back to good causes and support open-source initiatives

Have an ethical and sustainable product strategy

Success Criterion: Public documents

Machine-testable and Resources

Develop, publish and maintain key policies, such as a code of ethics, product guidelines, sustainability statements, and/or other documents that include language specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs. Make these publicly accessible and transparently versioned formats.

Success Criterion: Achievements and compliance

Machine-testable and Resources

Publish achievements, features, compliance, and anything beyond the scope of these guidelines within a dedicated sustainability section.

Success Criterion: Governance over time

Human-testable and Resources

Provide evidence to demonstrate how digital sustainability policies, climate policies, and related practices are effectively implemented, monitored, and governed over time.

Success Criterion: Onboarding new members

Human-testable and Resources

Provide training decks and workshops to support onboarding new team members in relation to sustainable product strategies.

Success Criterion: Documentation

Machine-testable and Resources

Document your methodology through impact storytelling, documentation, and creating resources to help individuals make more informed decisions and raise awareness among your visitors.

Success Criterion: Renewable evidence

Machine-testable and Resources

Demonstrate how digital products and services are powered using renewable energy.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Create a publicly available statement in an easy-to-find location on your website that outlines a clear commitment to prioritize ethics and sustainability PPP standards that align with the organization's mission, vision, and values and include statements specific to digital products, services, policies, and programs. This should be done while actively promoting such efforts (with evidence) using social channels.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Economic: Communicating the ways you can share the economic benefits of your digital work raises awareness of social inequalities. Similarly, enabling visitors to make more informed decisions can ensure your project is more financially sustainable overall.
  • Environment: Establishing clear sustainability statements should make it easier to align organizational policies and practices with measurable metrics and support goals. Integrating this early in the digital product strategy can improve efficiency and reduce environmental impact.
  • Operations: Establishing ethical and sustainability policies can help to ensure product teams are more engaged in the work they're doing.
  • Privacy: Reducing your emissions and explaining to your audience how you aim to keep to your sustainability commitments provides the opportunity to highlight other key issues of interest to your visitors, such as privacy and security. This can boost visitor trust in your brand.
  • Social Equity: Highlighting intersectional social issues in documentation, storytelling, and marketing materials raises awareness of problems and potential solutions.
  • Transparency: Maintaining clear and public-facing policies helps internal and external stakeholders to better understand an organization's sustainability commitments, while making it easier to report on the impact of these efforts.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Education, Ideation, KPIs, Research, Social Equity, Strategy

Assign a sustainability advocate

Success Criterion: Advocate for sustainability

Machine-testable and Resources

Assign a sustainability advocate with specific digital expertise and provide them with the resources, budget, tools, and time they need to achieve their stated goals. In some organizations, expanding this into a climate working group comprising motivated individuals can add further benefits.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Having someone within an organization who represents sustainability as a core agenda makes good sense due to the accessibility, performance, financial, and other benefits that can occur from following best practices. If the resources are available, a climate Working Group with willing participants could also be established.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Nominating a sustainability representative helps the organization remove barriers to access. These can inherently cost bandwidth, have monetary value, and carry potential legal implications.
  • Environment: Appointing dedicated sustainability representatives means they can maintain quality assurance and guide decisions that measurably reduce the environmental impact of your digital products and services.
  • Privacy: Having dedicated sustainability representatives on the team enables them to maintain intersectional data privacy standards and watch out for legal compliance issues within the organization.
  • Social Equity: Ensuring someone on the team is dedicated to these concerns will help to reduce the digital divide through internal awareness raising and requesting features or information be provided to support those, for example on older devices or in low-bandwidth areas.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Education, Ideation, Marketing, Social Equity

Inform, raise awareness, and train for sustainability

Success Criterion: Inform and aware

Human-testable and Resources

Inform and deliver training to all affected parties, including product teams, colleagues, and organizational decision-makers - both managers and clients - in both general and digital climate literacy, as well as your own sustainable technology policies.

Success Criterion: Routine training

Human-testable and Resources

Provide active and routine training where possible to develop, establish, and refresh skills relating to sustainability. This can be delivered as in-house training, courses, workshops, events, webinars, meetups, or other ongoing or on-demand methods that support your team in achieving sustainability objectives.

Success Criterion: Active participation

Machine-testable and Resources

Encourage participants to reduce their environmental impact. Share climate and sustainable initiatives and ideas. Provide resources on sustainable design, best practices, and concepts to assist them.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Businesses should not only reference their own materials showcasing how they are working towards becoming sustainable but cite existing sustainability best practices to help others looking to make similar changes within their own work or personal environments.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Environment: Keeping your team informed and educated may promote systemic change in the way they build, the way they manage their work and technical infrastructure, and even the way they do business or live their day-to-day lives - even outside the workplace.
  • Operations: Publishing clear sustainability goals and sharing resources encourages organizational affected parties to examine their own current status quo and make their own progress.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Content, Education, Marketing, Reporting

Communicate the environmental impact of user choices

Success Criterion: Communication of impact

Human-testable and Resources

Clearly communicate the environmental impact of different visitor choices and allow visitors to configure settings based on the information provided.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Allowing the visitor to take action to reduce their emissions is key to helping them play a part in becoming more sustainable. By helping them identify when choices they make could have an environmental impact (and by how much) and then providing them with the tooling choices to reduce their footprint, you can empower them to make a lasting difference.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: Communicating the impact and allowing the visitor to set preferences with the environmental impact in mind can encourage more individuals to make ecologically friendly choices and improve your image among ethical consumers.
  • Environment: Allowing visitors to select more environmentally friendly settings within software naturally reduces the environmental impact.
  • Performance: Reducing unnecessary or wasteful, less sustainable behaviors will often improve performance and accessibility, as these are often interlinked.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Content, Education, Marketing, Reporting

Estimate the environmental impact

Success Criterion: Life-cycle analysis

Human-testable and Resources

Conduct a full life-cycle analysis based on the functional unit defined under Guideline 5.15.

Success Criterion: Competitor impact

Machine-testable and Resources

Calculate the environmental impact of your or a competitor's current service to inform decision-making targets.

Success Criterion: Tooling impact

Human-testable and Resources

Include the impact or estimated impact of any tooling or third-party solutions used at any stage in your pipeline. While not created by you, the emissions generated in production, maintenance, and use are also integral to your overall solution.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Being able to identify key issues with your website or application is essential, and while not a foolproof method, using tooling can help you achieve an overall idea about the state of your product or service's environmental state (as such tools can do for accessibility).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Auditing for accessibility can be included as a key part of a digital Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), provided the key parameters are defined up front and maintained throughout the project to eliminate barriers to access. These parameters can include conformity with WCAG guidance, including manual checks.
  • Environment: Conducting a rigorous LCA can reveal significant opportunities to reduce overall environmental impact through the identification and elimination of variables and vectors of digital emissions such as water and e-waste.
  • Performance: Including a detailed overview of optimizations in your LCA provides a clear direction to improve sustainability and performance.
  • Social Equity: Including intersectional social metrics in your LCA can provide an opportunity to simultaneously consider and work on issues such as inequality, which also affect sustainability.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Ideation, KPIs, Research, Social Equity, Software, Strategy

Define clear organizational sustainability goals and metrics

Success Criterion: Sustainability goals

Machine-testable and Resources

Define and publish a clear set of sustainability goals. Publicly communicate how these goals can be met, including which performance metrics can be measured to help the organization and its various affected parties act more sustainably.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Define sustainability goals for the organization to meet and incorporate into its business model. Pair each goal with at least one clear, achievable metric or Key Performance Indicator (KPI).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Aligning with existing standards or frameworks makes it easier for organizations to include digital impact in their overall sustainability reporting.
  • Environment: Setting, measuring, and communicating clear sustainability goals aligns an organization's impact aspirations with ongoing efforts to meet these goals.
  • Transparency: Helping affected parties such as employees, clients, and partners to better understand how the organization creates shared value in its various sustainability policies and programs.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Governance, Ideation, KPIs, Research, Social Equity

Validate efforts using established third-party certifications

Success Criterion: Obtaining certifications

Machine-testable and Resources

Obtain one or more sustainability certifications and incorporate operational policies and practices in alignment with their guidance.

Success Criterion: Maintaining certifications

Human-testable and Resources

Maintains sustainability certifications through continuing to meet their criteria and evolving policies and practices over time.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Business certifications can fill the gaps left by incomplete sustainability legislation. Ensuring a business complies with third-party certifications will help verify and apply an objective level of rigor to an organization's sustainability efforts.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Certifications, vetted for conflicts of interest, can operationalize sustainability principles and verify and endorse levels of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.
  • Operations: Obtaining third-party sustainability certifications can make it easier for organizations to align operational practices with their mission, vision, and values, and communicate this to their affected parties.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Governance, KPIs

Implement sustainability onboarding guidelines

Success Criterion: Training materials

Human-testable and Resources

Create and/or deliver dedicated training manuals, workshops, and materials to outline the sustainability policies and practices adopted and how to implement them. Manage and maintain these materials over time, adapting them as new policies and best practices arise.

Success Criterion: Incentivize progress

Human-testable and Resources

Incentivize leadership, teams, and individuals to make progress toward the goals outlined in their training. Examples include dedicating time for sustainability-related activities, recognizing completion, and other benefits.

Success Criterion: Negative variables

Human-testable and Resources

Anticipate and map potential negative external variables and act to minimize their overall impact.

Additional information

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Intent

The organization has clear onboarding and training processes that include PPP policies and practices with explicit references to digital sustainability and responsibility. Ensure that onboarding utilizes a "green by default" process and avoids being an opt-in procedure. This applies equally at an organizational level and to visitors and consumers of your products and services.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Providing sustainability training and onboarding practices has been shown to lead to higher retention rates, improved performance, and improved systems for maintaining business continuity.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Education, Strategy

Support mandatory disclosures and reporting

Success Criterion: Policies and practices

Machine-testable and Resources

Create and publish policies and practices to disclose the social and environmental impacts of its products, programs, and services in line with existing reporting standards such as GRI, SASB, etc.

Success Criterion: Impact reports

Machine-testable and Resources

Produce a publicly available impact report outlining progress compared to previous reports on social and environmental goals at least once per year.

Success Criterion: Standards and policies

Machine-testable and Resources

Publicly and transparently demonstrate commitment over time to following and adopting existing and/or emerging environmental standards and legislative policy that promotes mandatory emissions disclosures and reporting.

Success Criterion: Impact reduction

Human-testable and Resources

Clearly identify how environmental impact is being reduced, with careful avoidance of double accounting, greenwashing, data exclusion, or other misleading or manipulative techniques.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization discloses and reports its PPP impact on at least an annual basis.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: Demonstrating transparency through regular reporting and showing measurable improvement over time can increase an organization's appeal to potential employees, partners, potential customers, investors, and suppliers who perceive shared values and an aligned mission.
  • Economic: Being ahead of the curve affords businesses greater resilience in the face of more rigorous standards.
  • Environment: Adopting reporting standards ahead of schedule provides more immediate environmental benefits, and allows you to mitigate environmental issues before they build into more complex or long-lasting ones.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Content, KPIs, Reporting

Create one or more impact business models

Success Criterion: Theory of change

Human-testable and Resources

Complete and operationalize a theory of change process with requisite documentation to identify the impact the organization aspires to achieve, how it will generate revenue, how it will create shared or added value from these activities, and how it will measure results based on desired outcomes. In the case of projects already underway, how these are generating revenue and actively tracking and measuring progress against desired outcomes.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

An Impact Business Model enables an organization to incorporate specific impact initiatives into one or more business models for generating revenue, often making them "green by default" and folding impact initiatives into the organization's operating system. Moreover, being able to calculate the return on investment in terms of sustainability your product or service will bring is important to identifying whether it poses a net-positive or net-negative effect on the environment.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Environment: Business models focused on the customer and the wider ecosystem rather than just financial indicators can benefit the environment such as through reducing overconsumption of resources and disencouraging incentives for unethical behavior, leading to a reduction of emissions.
  • Social Equity: Adding social indicators (such as the shared value within digital services) can reduce negative social impacts such as impoverishment or exploitation.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Content, Ideation, Research, Strategy

Follow a product management and maintenance Strategy

Success Criterion: Management and maintenance

Machine-testable and Resources

Produce and maintain documentation to outline how the organization approaches product management and maintenance.

Success Criterion: Planning Strategy

Human-testable and Resources

Establish maintenance and security plans for all digital products and services.

Success Criterion: Resourcing products

Human-testable and Resources

Appropriately resource products over time via staffing and budgeting to support code refactoring, address technical debt, introduce new product features, test functionality, and produce product or service maintenance plans to continue supporting customers, visitors, and other affected parties.

Success Criterion: Resource measurement

Human-testable and Resources

Incorporate carbon and resource measurement into maintenance programs and show measurable improvement over time.

Success Criterion: Failure indicators

Human-testable and Resources

Identify and document Key Failure Indicators (KFIs) and implement resolutions to prevent negative sustainability impacts.

Additional information

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Intent

The organization has clearly defined governance policies around how it manages and maintains digital products and services over time.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Maintaining performance can boost customer retention, and organizations with clear product maintenance and management practices tend to benefit from greater resilience in the face of digital disruption.
  • Environment: Implementing product management and maintenance strategies provides another opportunity to improve climate resilience and manage and reduce emissions over time.
  • Performance: Following good product management and maintenance strategies means affected digital products and services benefit from better security, reduced technical debt, and improved data privacy.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Compatibility, Strategy

Implement continuous improvement procedures

Success Criterion: Continuous improvement

Human-testable and Resources

Establish policies and practices to enable continuous improvement and resource practices appropriately to support these efforts over time.

Success Criterion: Retrospectives conducted

Human-testable and Resources

Review deliverables and update frequency to ensure project teams have enough time to conduct user research, identify technical debt, and produce high-quality output as well as share what they learned.

Success Criterion: Iterative consideration

Machine-testable and Resources

Display a track record of continuous improvement (iteration) processes to analyze the digital product or service. Simultaneously address any potential consequences of ongoing experimentation, such as technical debt, product performance, and emissions. Analytics are limited to strictly necessary features that aid decision-making, encouraging visitor feedback, and comparing performance against business goals and visitor needs.

Success Criterion: Functionality decisions

Human-testable and Resources

Justify and prioritize the retention of existing features, the creation of new functionality, and the decommissioning or elimination of unused functionality or low-traffic content throughout the product's life cycle on a case-by-case basis.

Success Criterion: Security updates

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide corrective security and policy updates during the product or service life cycle. These should be distinguished from more extensive evolutionary updates.

Success Criterion: Skills and maintenance

Human-testable and Resources

Develop sustainable product and data strategies using appropriate training techniques. These should help your team build capacity and learn new skills to manage and maintain products and services over time.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization has policies and practices in place to embrace experimentation, foster a growth mindset, support organizational agility, and provide continuous improvement. Product creators should iterate, regularly, though never at the cost of getting things done (such as working on larger, long-term features).

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Adopting an iterative approach supports inclusive design, providing the agility and adaptability for organizations to expand their accessibility.
  • Conversion: Providing a reliable user experience boosts user trust, encouraging repeat business.
  • Economic: Ensuring agility and continuous improvement helps organizations be more resilient in the face of disruption and a changing climate. Long-term, these practices save the organization time, money, and resources.
  • Environment: Focusing on continuous improvement reduces waste and energy use by iteratively identifying opportunities to improve the product or service.
  • Operations: Fostering a culture of experimentation encourages innovation. This supports team building and improves overall organizational resilience and efficiency.
  • Performance: Establishing good review processes reduces buildup of technical debt. Focusing on continuous improvement rather than large single-scale releases means bottlenecks can be resolved, and they become apparent. This is helpful as new third-party tools, and software can affect performance without adaptation.
  • Privacy: Having a high-quality, regularly updated product or service will reduce the chances of a data breach, which improves privacy.
  • Security: Ensuring products or services are maintained and updated over time reduces risk and improves security.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Compatibility, KPIs, Performance, Security, Strategy, UI

Document future updates and evolutions

Success Criterion: Feature changes

Human-testable and Resources

When a feature is added, updated, or removed to improve user experience, clear documentation of the changes is provided in a well structured, semantically versioned document.

Additional information

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Intent

Products or services are updated regularly. Ensure that additions, changes, deprecations, removals, fixes, or security patches are documented in an easy-to-perceive document with details that showcase how such changes affect the visitor (or how they can take advantage of new features).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Economic: Updating digital products and services regularly requires less development time and reduces the risk of negative consumer impact from the extended downtime that can result from needing to start from scratch if a product or service is otherwise left to become outdated beyond repair.
  • Environment: Maintaining an intuitive, lightweight user experience while adding new features or updating software reduces frustration, churn, and the energy visitors expend when the interface performs in ways visitors do not expect.
  • Performance: Maintaining an optimized user experience that is regularly updated in line with best practices usually means content and assets will load quickly and as expected by visitors.
  • Security: Maintaining evergreen status often means fewer issues due to a strong release cycle. This involves making necessary changes and keeping visitors informed while maintaining transparency.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Example

								# Changelog - Website

								## [Unreleased]
								- N/A

								## 1.0.0 - YYYY-MM-DD
								### Added
								- Content.

								## [Guide]
								- Added: New features.
								- Changed: Altered functionality.
								- Deprecated: Disappearing features.
								- Removed: Eliminated features.
								- Fixed: Bugs patched.
								- Security: Solved vulnerabilities.
							

Tags

Compatibility, Content, Education, Usability

Establish if a digital product or service is necessary

Success Criterion: Sustainable Development Goals

Machine-testable and Resources

Identify where the product or service aligns with one of the U.N. (SDGs) and its appropriate targets within a sustainability statement.

Success Criterion: Creation evaluation

Human-testable and Resources

Determine that the product or service is necessary based upon desirability, feasibility, and viability factors.

Success Criterion: Avoid duplication

Human-testable and Resources

Establish that no existing digital product or service offers the same value. Conduct an analysis to understand the market for this requirement.

Success Criterion: Obstacle consideration

Human-testable and Resources

Remove or alleviate any obstacles to using a product or service, such as accessibility, equality, technical, or territorial.

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Intent

Ensure that the product or service you are creating offers value to visitors and doesn't duplicate existing functionality (without bringing something new to the table) as this redundancy wastes digital and physical resources.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Low

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Preventing unnecessary digital products or services from being created can make it easier to find and access existing information, provided an accessible replacement is available.
  • Economic: Reducing unnecessary research and development allows organizations to cut costs.
  • Environment: Determining that a digital product or service is not necessary means the potential environmental impacts associated with its creation and use can be avoided.
  • Operations: Avoiding creating unnecessary products or services prevents organizations from wasting time or resources on their creation and maintenance.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

E-Waste, Ideation, Reporting, Software

Conduct a full life-cycle assessment

Success Criterion: Life-cycle assessment

Human-testable and Resources

Conduct a life-cycle assessment (LCA) to define sustainability-related functional impacts throughout a product's lifetime.

Additional information

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Intent

The functional unit of a product is a quantified description of the performance requirements that the product fulfills. Ensure you identify the requirements of your product before development.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Using a functional unit approach supports a robust product or service while avoiding unnecessary and potentially costly features.
  • Environment: Using functional units enables the comparison of non-equivalent products or services in the assessment of environmental impacts.
  • Performance: Focusing on a functional unit drives performance-based choices for a better, more efficient, and faster user experience.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Ideation, Reporting, Research

Provide a supplier standards of practice document

Success Criterion: Vetting potential partners

Machine-testable and Resources

Create specific policies to vet potential partners along the supply chain based on sustainability principles.

Success Criterion: Collaborative measurement

Human-testable and Resources

Partner with suppliers to create, track and measure impact on issues that impact affected parties.

Success Criterion: Informative partner promotion

Machine-testable and Resources

Promote and disclose partnerships in a publicly available place, along with information on how the partnership creates a collective impact.

Additional information

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Intent

The organization collaborates with suppliers, authors, clients, and other partners on initiatives that are both mutually beneficial and create positive social and environmental outcomes.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Economic: Applying standards of practice can help an organization better align affected party needs with its mission, vision, and values, which builds trust and improves relationships.
  • Environment: Vetting suppliers and partners can help an organization define, track, and reduce its scope 3 emissions.
  • Operations: Examining suppliers and partners more closely can increase diversity within the technology sector.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Content, Governance, Hardware, Ideation, Social Equity

Share economic benefits

Success Criterion: Living wage

Machine-testable and Resources

Publicly commit to paying employees, contractors, and other affected parties a living wage.

Success Criterion: Incentivisation

Human-testable and Resources

Have policies and practices to incentivize affected parties, such as workers and contractors, to meet impact goals.

Success Criterion: Employee benefits

Machine-testable and Resources

Provide benefits to employees in accordance with resources, including, where relevant, healthcare, retirement planning, flex time, profit sharing, and more.

Success Criterion: Legislation advocacy

Human-testable and Resources

Advocate for responsible legislation that supports employment rights, transparency, and accountability related to sharing economic benefits.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization shares the economic benefits of its digital products, services, policies, and programs.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Collaborating with affected parties to coordinate mutually beneficial economic incentives builds stronger relationships.
  • Social Equity: Paying a living wage and offering good benefits often leads to higher employee retention rates.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Governance, Social Equity

Share decision-making power with affected parties

Success Criterion: Decision-making

Human-testable and Resources

Align the project team's goals with key business objectives, and affected parties (for example, project managers) have the power and autonomy to make key decisions on the organization's behalf.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Ensuring that everyone has a seat at the table is important to promoting voices who may not otherwise have their voices heard, and potentially getting useful ideas from fresh sources.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Environment: Emissions can be reduced through group action and commitments at an organizational level.
  • Operations: Incentivizing project teams with key sustainability goals and granting the authority to make decisions based on these criteria enables them to measurably improve a range of metrics within the business, design, development, and infrastructure categories.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Ideation, Social Equity, Strategy

Use Justice, Equity, Diversity, Inclusion (JEDI) practices

Success Criterion: JEDI practices

Human-testable and Resources

Document commitments to JEDI practices with clear policies on how marginalized or otherwise underserved communities are prioritized.

Success Criterion: Accessibility policy

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish a publicly displayed accessibility policy and demonstrate this via accessible digital products or services.

Success Criterion: JEDI training

Human-testable and Resources

Provide JEDI-related training materials and schedule regular workshops related to how this topic manifests itself in digital products and services, covering topics such as algorithmic bias, digital divide, employment, mis- and disinformation.

Success Criterion: JEDI improvements

Human-testable and Resources

Show measurable improvement over time across hiring, leadership, and operations.

Success Criterion: JEDI legislation

Human-testable and Resources

Advocate for responsible legislation relating to JEDI practices, especially as they relate to digital products and services.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization has public policies and practices supporting racial justice, inclusion, equity, and diversity in hiring and operations.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Accessibility: Incorporating more diverse affected party perspectives leads to enacting more inclusive policies, often resulting in better products, services, and programs. JEDI practices boost an organization's resilience and ability to collaborate. This improves diversity in the tech sector and the overall accessibility of the web.
  • Economic: Having clear policies and practices reduces the risk of legal issues.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Accessibility, Ideation, Social Equity, Strategy

Promote responsible data practices

Success Criterion: Data practices

Machine-testable and Resources

Maintain a publicly accessible privacy policy, terms and conditions, and any other documents as required by law in the jurisdictions in which the product or service operates. Adhere to the most restrictive data protection regulations, especially when providing services outside the organization's country. Provide documents in accessible formats and use clear, user-friendly language to ensure comprehension by all visitors. Avoid unnecessary jargon, technical language, and legalese. Support emerging legislation and implement best practices related to data privacy, sustainability, and responsible data management.

Success Criterion: Data ownership

Human-testable and Resources

Demonstrate measurable progress over time in regard to respecting data privacy and ownership. Specify how data disposal and a visitor's "right to be forgotten" will be handled, along with ownership rights. Also, provide the ability to download or export data they have contributed into a non-proprietary format.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization commits to responsible data practices, prioritizing data privacy, security, and ethical use. This includes data minimization, purpose limitation, accuracy, storage limitation, integrity, confidentiality, and accountability. Publicly accessible documentation, such as Privacy Policies and Terms and Conditions, follows best practices for clarity and accessibility, avoiding technical jargon and complex legal language to ensure inclusivity for diverse users.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Prioritizing data privacy and other responsible data practices reduces associated risk and costs, increases resilience, and often fosters better relationships with customers and other affected parties.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Content, Governance, Privacy, Social Equity

Implement appropriate data management procedures

Success Criterion: Outdated content

Machine-testable and Resources

Archive and delete outdated or otherwise expired product content and data via automated expiration dates and scheduled product audits. Publish the archiving schedule, ensuring a lightweight version of the old searchable content is maintained for those that may require it.

Success Criterion: Data controllers

Machine-testable and Resources

Allow users to control, manage, and delete their data, subscriptions, and accounts.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Expired or unused data has a cost, takes up space, and requires maintenance. As such, the ability for customers to manage their own data and for service providers to manage older website material which no longer applies but might still have use will be a carbon benefit.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Economic: Requiring less data reduces storage requirements, allowing organizations to scale down their hosting package or be charged less for pay-by-use infrastructure costs.
  • Environment: Storing less data reduces the computing power required to maintain a service, reducing energy and infrastructure-related emissions.
  • Performance: Moving older and less relevant content onto a smaller scaled-down version of your digital product or service will reduce your bandwidth usage. Archived information will have significantly fewer visitors, meaning this is unlikely to have a negative impact on their experience.
  • Privacy: Improving data management supports better data protection practices.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Privacy, Security, Social Equity, Strategy

Promote and implement responsible emerging technology practices

Success Criterion: Emerging technologies

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish public-facing policies for emerging technologies. Ensure all such technologies and their datasets are ethically sourced, screened, validated, and implemented in a non-discriminatory, responsible manner.

Success Criterion: Disruptive technology

Human-testable and Resources

Show how workers are trained as new technologies and practices potentially disrupt an organisations business model.

Success Criterion: Technology legislation

Human-testable and Resources

Support and comply with responsible legislation related to emerging technologies

Success Criterion: Environmental responsibilities

Human-testable and Resources

Audit and account for any environmental considerations that may derive from the use of emerging technologies wishing to be promoted or implemented. This should include third-party choices, the expense in terms of waste or emissions of using the technology to create a desired result, and consequences that may arise from its deployment.

Success Criterion: Automated tooling

Human-testable and Resources

Ensure all automated tooling, scrapers, spiders, bots, artificial intelligence, and other forms of machine-assisted data gathering abides by requests to opt out at the host, server, or website level. Providers must declare themselves as non-human within the user-agent/HTTP header. Providers must also publish impact reports relating to their gathering activities.

Success Criterion: Quantum resilience

Human-testable and Resources

Do not roll out post-quantum encryption for high-traffic services that do not need resilience against harvest now, decrypt later attacks, where attackers steal encrypted data, anticipating that future quantum computers will be powerful enough to break the encryption and make the data readable at a later date.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization has devised and implemented responsible policies related to artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things (IoT), Web3 (Decentralized Web, blockchain, etc), and related emerging technologies.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Establishing clear policies related to digital disruption and emerging technologies makes organizations more resilient and better able to pivot quickly, and face less risk from various threats, including legal action.
  • Operations: Prioritizing ongoing learning and continuous improvement builds stronger teams that can adapt more quickly.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Content, E-Waste, Governance, Hardware, Networking, Performance, Privacy, Security, Social Equity, Software

Include responsible financial policies

Success Criterion: Fuel divestment

Machine-testable and Resources

Divest from fossil fuels and move banking, sponsorship, and other affiliations to more responsible partners.

Success Criterion: Responsible finance

Human-testable and Resources

Engage in flexible financing and responsible budgeting to accommodate long-term care and maintenance.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization implements responsible finance strategies, including divesting from fossil fuels and appropriately resourcing digital products and services to account for long-term care and maintenance.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Economic: Sourcing responsible financing for digital products and services improves their resilience and saves the organization time, money, and resources over time.
  • Environment: Divesting from fossil fuels moves us more quickly to an economy that is powered by renewable energy, which can reduce the catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Governance, Ideation, Social Equity

Include organizational philanthropy policies

Success Criterion: Philanthropy policy

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish a clear corporate giving policy and create philanthropic partnerships with strategically aligned organizations.

Success Criterion: Voluntary work

Human-testable and Resources

Engage in free or volunteer projects to help teams learn new tools and tactics, while also helping charities and non-profit organizations to build capacity.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

For-profit organizations have clear philanthropy policies and practices in place to help non-profit organizations build digital capacity and acumen while also engaging their own teams in meaningful work that promotes shared learning and stretch goals.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Following clear philanthropic strategies means there is usually a system of checks and balances in place to support better financial practices overall.
  • Operations: Having clear philanthropy strategies that include volunteer or free projects with team stretch goals can boost employee engagement and retention.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Content, Governance, Social Equity

Plan for a digital product or service's care and end-of-life

Success Criterion: End-of-life care

Human-testable and Resources

Provide clear, documented end-of-life guidelines that include data disposal, archiving, file deletion, and other relevant guidance.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Everything ends at some point, planning for if and when a product or service is finalized makes good ethical sense to ensure customers can be transitioned toward a replacement rather than losing access to their data.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Removing redundancy in the product or service can generate savings in hosting, security costs, and other third-party subscriptions.
  • Environment: Planning for end-of-life reduces long-term environmental impacts after a digital product or service is no longer needed. This eliminates waste and frees up resources.
  • Performance: Removing unnecessary features, functions, and data of a service improves performance and resilience as the resources which were utilizing data will be better spent on more popular functionality, and the gains made from their elimination will be felt in terms of emissions through saved development time.
  • Privacy: Incorporating clear end-of-life policies that include a visitor's right to be forgotten will benefit the visitor by explaining how you enforce data protection and comply with legislation.
  • Security: Providing regular maintenance, updates, and care on outdated software and data can significantly reduce security risks.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Compatibility, E-Waste, Research, Social Equity, Software, Strategy

Include e-waste, right to repair, and recycling policies

Success Criterion: E-waste policy

Human-testable and Resources

Establish specific policies around e-waste recycling and repair owned technology products whenever possible.

Success Criterion: Recycling and repairing

Human-testable and Resources

Form relationships with local partners for e-waste recycling and repair.

Success Criterion: Refurbishment Strategy

Human-testable and Resources

Buy refurbished equipment whenever possible.

Success Criterion: Right to repair

Human-testable and Resources

Allow consumers to repair the consumables they purchase to the best of their ability, offering replacement components if possible at cost, and provide clear instructions to help resolve faults that occur.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization addresses e-waste, right-to-repair, recycling, and related practices in its operations.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Extending the shelf-life of hardware and clear e-waste and recycling policies reduce costs.
  • Environment: Following clear e-waste and recycling policies reduces environmental impact and promotes circularity, while also extending the shelf life of hardware. When coupled with clear philanthropic policies, donated hardware can also support resource-constrained charities.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
High
GRI 302: Energy
High
GRI 303: Water
High
GRI 305: Emissions
High

Tags

Content, E-Waste, Governance, Hardware, Ideation, Social Equity

Define performance and environmental budgets

Success Criterion: Environmental budget

Machine-testable and Resources

Define and document clear sustainability budget criteria that covers impact from creation to consumption. Communicate this to affected parties.

Success Criterion: Performance budget

Machine-testable and Resources

Use a performance budget to set a target maximum size of your digital product or service to monitor and reduce impact of data transfer, file type size, and more.

Success Criterion: Human budget

Human-testable and Resources

Define KPIs around engineering hours, development time, or sprints while keeping the health and well-being of your workers paramount. Sustainably optimize workflows to allow all tasks to be performed with care.

Success Criterion: Measurable improvements

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish a baseline and measurement criteria to track improvements over time. Improvement claims must be evidenced and verifiable.

Success Criterion: Capacity and maintenance

Human-testable and Resources

Invest in resources to build capacity and maintain budgets over time.

Additional information

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This section is non-normative.

Intent

Setting targets and limits regarding your product or service is important for keeping a sustainable mindset. Using budgets, you can declare the remits of which you will work within to ensure your emissions do not fall outside (and monitor your progress through development).

Impact and Effort

Impact
Medium
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Conversion: Improving performance will reduce churn and page abandonment. A website may also rank better on search engines thanks to performance being a key indicator in ranking algorithms.
  • Economic: Reducing resource requirements means visitors will not have to keep upgrading devices to match the needs of digital products and services that are otherwise growing unchecked over time.
  • Environment: Setting a strict sustainability or performance budget will reduce the chance of a digital product or service getting too large or resulting in pollution transfers, which will also ensure it has a minimal impact on a visitor's device. This has a direct impact on emissions by forcing businesses to choose where to make reductions and efficiency savings. Visitors not having to upgrade devices as frequently will also reduce e-waste from discarded devices.
  • Performance: Keeping realistic goals regarding delivery size will push developers to optimize resource-heavy projects and reconsider using large tooling in place of lightweight alternatives. A lower target budget for a product or service will also decrease the amount of time spent transferring and rendering data.
  • Social Equity: By having a human or planetary budget, you can assign targets to improve services for impacted groups or those affected directly by your project.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Example

								[
								{
									"resourceSizes": [],
									"timings": [
									{
										"metric": "largest-contentful-paint",
										"budget": 2500
									},
									{
										"metric": "max-potential-fid",
										"budget": 100
									},
									{
										"metric": "cumulative-layout-shift",
										"budget": 0.1
									}
									]
								}
								]
							

Tags

Accessibility, Ideation, KPIs, Performance, Research, Usability

Use open source where possible

Success Criterion: Open source policy

Machine-testable and Resources

Establish a clear open source policy that outlines how open-source tools are used and any practices used to support open-source development.

Success Criterion: Collaboration

Human-testable and Resources

Show a track record of collaboration and building communities around open-source principles.

Success Criterion: Contribution

Machine-testable and Resources

Contribute regularly in terms of code, human-time, and/or financially, to open-source community-based projects.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

The organization has clear policies about using open source tools, including how it gives back to the community and responsibly manages code repositories to reduce waste.

Impact and Effort

Impact
High
Effort
High

Benefits

  • Economic: Using open-source tools can significantly reduce development time when managed properly.
  • Social Equity: Supporting collaboration and building communities around open-source practices engenders trust and helps to reduce inequalities.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Medium
GRI 302: Energy
Medium
GRI 303: Water
Medium
GRI 305: Emissions
Medium

Tags

Assets, Ideation, Social Equity, Software, UI

Create a business continuity and disaster recovery plan

Success Criterion: Plan of action

Human-testable and Resources

Create, regularly review, and occasionally test a plan of action to determine readiness in case of an incident and establish procedures to quickly recover from any incident.

Success Criterion: Audience awareness

Machine-testable and Resources

Maintain regular and transparent communication with the audience regarding issues that may affect service delivery or user data.

Additional information

Show / Hide additional information to understand this guideline and its success criteria.

This section is non-normative.

Intent

Resilience of the product or service in case of a disaster or emergency should be ensured to restore and maintain operations in case of disruptions.

Impact and Effort

Impact
Low
Effort
Medium

Benefits

  • Economic: Limiting the extent of the disruption has obvious economic benefits.
  • Operations: Creating transparency around digital resilience procedures encourages trust that a product or service can be depended upon for critical use.
  • Social Equity: Providing uninterrupted access to potentially vital online services in case of a disaster or emergency benefits users.

Reporting

You can find details about complying with [[GRI]] through the body behind the standard.

GRI 301: Materials
Low
GRI 302: Energy
Low
GRI 303: Water
Low
GRI 305: Emissions
Low

Tags

Governance, Security, Strategy

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    Hosting, Infrastructure, and Systems
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    Considerations

Considerations

Guidelines within this specification which the Interest Group has identified possible implications for accessibility, privacy, or security, either by providing protections for end users or which are important for website providers to take in to consideration when implementing features designed to implement digital sustainability, are listed below. This list reflects the current understanding of the Interest Group but other guidelines may have implications that the Interest Group is not aware of at the time of publishing.

Individuals or organizations wishing to understand more about best practices relating to these objectives should read the relevant materials provided by W3C Working and Interest Groups in this area, as the result of good accessibility, privacy, and security, can benefit both people and the planet in measurable ways.

It is relevant to note that groups working on accessibility, privacy, and security may identify sustainability impacts within their work and may provide relevant guidance where appropriate on best practices to limit the scope of these concerns. Any such guidance should be considered as complementary to that provided within the WSG.

Accessibility

Guidelines within this specification that may relate to accessibility are:

Privacy

Guidelines within this specification that may relate to privacy are:

Security

Guidelines within this specification that may relate to security are:

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    Business Strategy and Product Management
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    Glossary

Glossary

Accessibility

Web accessibility (within the context of Inclusive Design) means that websites, tools, and technologies are designed and developed so that people with disabilities (and those without) can use them, free of barriers.

Types of accessibility barriers can include auditory, cognitive, neurological, physical, speech, and visual. They can also be permanent, temporary, or situational (depending on the situation).

PPP

Planet, People, and Prosperity (PPP) is a set of principles that recommends considering each of these factors during the sustainability process.

This method of considering both people and the planet (alongside the needs of business) is known under other abbreviations with similar objectives such as Environmental, Social, and (corporate) Governance (ESG), which considers economic variables alongside; there is also Environment, Equity, and Economy (EEE) that follow a similar pattern.

Such work is grounded within the three pillars of sustainability:

  1. Planet: We prioritize the health of the environment, ecosystems, and the planet overall.
  2. People: People should have access to resources, information, and opportunities necessary for their well-being.
  3. Prosperity: Financial stability and equitable economic development—in this case, through the digital economy—ensures shared prosperity for the planet and its inhabitants.
Informative

For information purposes and not required for compliance.

Content identified as "informative" or "non-normative" is never required for compliance.

Normative

Required for compliance.

Web Sustainability

An approach to designing digital products and services that puts people and the planet first.

Aiming for a clean (hosted using renewables), efficient (using the fewest resources possible), open (accessible and user-controlled data), honest (avoiding misleading or exploiting visitors), regenerative (support people and the planet), and resilient (function under any circumstances) service or product.

Visitors

Within the context of this specification:

  • A visitor is an individual who may visit a website but not necessarily use or interact with (in a measurable way) the products or services provided by the provider.
  • A user is an individual who visits a website or application but also uses and interacts with the features provided (whether or not information is exchanged).

In many cases, visitor and user on the web are used interchangeably (and this is perfectly acceptable), but we have chosen to make this distinction to provide context that in certain cases, individuals (for privacy reasons or simply because certain users just glancing or certain websites having static content) may not be classified as a user (in the sense of a customer) as they are a window shopper (visitor).

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    Considerations
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    Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments

Additional information about participation in the Sustainable Web Interest Group can be found within the GitHub repository of the Interest Group.

Participants active in the development of this document

Alexander Dawson, Andrea Davanzo, Andrew Wright, Andy Blum, Anne Faubry, Arnaud Levy, Ben Clifford, Berwyn Powell, Brett Tackaberry, Brian Louis Ramirez, Chris Adams, Chris Augier, Chris Butterworth, Chris Needham, Chris Sater, Chris Wilson, Claire Thornewill, Daniel Appelquist, David Jeanmonod, Dennis Lemm, Diogo Abrantes Da Silva, Dom Robinson, Dominique Hazael-Massieux, Emily Trotter, Fershad Irani, Francesco Fullone, François Burra, Gaël Duez, Hidde De Vries, Iain McClenaghan, Ian Jacobs, Ines Akrap, Ismael Velasco, Iulia Raluca Ionita, James Christie, Jeffrey Yasskin, Jennifer Strickland, Jens Oliver Meiert, Jim McCool, Josh Kim, Julien Wilhelm, Kazuhito Kidachi, Laurent Devernay Satyagraha, Len Dierickx, Leon Brocard, Łukasz Mastalerz, Marie Ototoi, Michelle Barker, Mike Gifford, Morgan Murrah, Nahuai Badiola, Neil Clark, Nick Doty, Nicola Bonotto, Nick Lewis, Orie Steele, Owen Barton, Owen Rogers, Peter Krautzberger, Philippe Le Hégaret, Romuald Priol, Rose Newell, Rudolf Van Der Berg, Ryan Sholin, Sandy Dähnert, Sarah Zama, Shane Herath, Simon Perdrisat, Susannah Hill, Tantek Çelik, Thibaud Colas, Thorsten Jonas, Tim Frick, Tzviya Siegman, Youen Chéné, Yuna Orsini, Zoe Lopez-Latorre.

Other active participants, or contributors to supporting resources

Adam Newman, Aiste Rugeviciute, Alekh Gupta, Alicia Pritchett, Alisa Bonsignore, Anthony Vallée-Dubois, Antoine Abélard, Asim Hussain, Bee Flaherty, Boris Schapira, Brian Sharpe, Carine Bournez, Christian H Brown, Christophe Clouzeau, Christos Bacharakis, Crystal Preston-Watson, Danielle Subject, Denis Didier, Edward Bender, Elise West, Eloisa Guerrero, Emma Horrell, Florence Maurice, Gerry McGovern, Greg McDonald, Hannah Smith, Ignacio Rondini, Ivano Malavolta, James Cannings, James Gallagher, Jan Henckens, Jean Rigotti, Jeroen Hulscher, Jon Gibbins, Juan Sotés, Julien Robitaille, Kate Mroczkowski, Katya Dreyer-Oren, Kimi Wei, Laila Tamani, Leah Goldfarb, Lenchi Danch, Loren Velasquez, Louise Towler, Luciene Bulhões Mattos, Luis Tiago, Manfred Jurgovsky, Marie Koesnodihardjo, Mark Butcher, Marketa Benisek, Mert Altinöz, Michelle Sanver, Moritz Guth, Nick Oliveira, Nick Sollecito, Nicolas Lanthemann, Nicholas Oliveira, Nicolas Oren, Oliver Winks, Patrick Hypscher, Pietro Jarre, Radu Micu, Rafael Lebre, Rebecca Brocton, Rick Butterfield, Rick Viscomi, Robin Whittleton, Samuel Pitoňák, Sandra Pallier, Sarven Capadisli, Sebastien Solere, Sylvain Tenier, Thierry Leboucq, Thomas Alexander Munch-Woolff, Tom Greenwood, Tom Howells, Torsten Beyer, Tristan Nitot, Yelle Lieder, Youcef Bekhti.

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    Glossary
  2. Full document
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    Changelog

Changelog

Note that this changelog only identifies substantive changes since the final draft Community Group Report dated Dec 6, 2024.

For a list of all issues addressed, refer to the Interest Group and former Community Group issue trackers.

Ongoing Release Notes

Additions:

  • None

Updates:

  • None

Fixes:

  • [#89] & [#90] Structure of the crossover links has been improved for accessibility.
    @jenstrickland, @pkra, @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#90] Attribution for authors now conforms to pubRules with acknowledgements link.
    @AlexDawsonUK & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#100] Editorial improvements have been provided for the category introductions.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @awright1979-alt, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @hidde, @ines-akrap, @jenstrickland, @ryansholin, @susannah-hill, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#101] Editorial improvements have been provided for the UX Success Criteria.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @awright1979-alt, @ChrisButterworth, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @jenstrickland, @the-sustainabledev, Sarah Zama, @thorstenjonas, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#93], [#102], & [#104] Editorial improvements have been provided for the Web Dev Success Criteria.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @hidde, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#105] Editorial improvements have been provided for the Hosting Success Criteria.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @susannah-hill, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#107] Editorial improvements have been provided for the Business Success Criteria.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, @fershad, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#108] Editorial improvements have been provided for the UX benefits.
    @awright1979-alt, @codewordcreative, @jenstrickland, Sarah Zama, @thorstenjonas, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#109] Editorial improvements have been provided for the Web Dev benefits.
    @codewordcreative, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#110] Editorial improvements have been provided for the Hosting benefits.
    @codewordcreative, @susannah-hill, @ryansholin, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#113] Editorial improvements have been provided for the Business benefits.
    @codewordcreative, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#114] Editorial improvements have been provided for the examples.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, & @timfrick
Q2 2025 Release Notes (30th June 2025)

Additions:

  • [#6] New Resources supplement that will serve as the repository for sustainability links.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#14], [#58], [#67], & [#68] Guideline filters using data-attributes (for full-document mode) available.
    @airbr, @AlexDawsonUK, @ldevernay, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#41] Living Changelog section has been added to the WSG (Github Releases will continue).
    @AlexDawsonUK & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#53] New Success Criteria for 4.1 providing coverage regarding the impact of Domain Names.
    @codewordcreative & @exortech
  • [#68] New Considerations section with Accessibility, Privacy, and Security cross-references.
    @AlexDawsonUK & @TzviyaSiegman

Updates:

  • [#30] & [#55] Former accessibility guideline 3.5 is removed. Useful material merged into SC for 2.29.
    @airbr, @andreadavanzo, & @hidde
  • [#45] Success Criteria for 3.11 updated to reflect more appropriate Structured Data use.
    @hidde
  • [#51] Success Criteria for 3.5 updated on to avoid CSS methodology naming.
    @airbr & @andreadavanzo
  • [#52] & [#67] Deliverables updated to ensure case-use and interactive elements are consistant.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#56] Category intros have been re-written to include more material (subheadings, goals & benefits).
    @AlexDawsonUK & @codewordcreative
  • [#67] & [#72] Additional useful resources have been included within the specification.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#67] Updated the introduction to provide better coverage of new sections and supplements.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#67] Tags have been sorted into alphabetical order to maximize readability.
    @AlexDawsonUK

Fixes:

  • [#41] Fixed abbreviation usage to ensure alignment across the specification and deliverables.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#41] Resolved some outdated website references that existed within the STAR Test Suite.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#42] Fixed multiPage issues including left-padding on buttons and full-document refresh.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#42] Glossary now correctly appears as part of the index rather than the main WSG document.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#42], [#43], & [#48] Multiple spelling and grammar fixes have been applied to the document.
    @AlexDawsonUK & @hidde
  • [#50] Fixed the references to particular files by noting the full filename alongside.
    @airbr
  • [#59] & [#80] Broken links and redirects have been resolved or removed.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#60] & [#68] Removed obsolete CSS and JavaScript in the source code to improve performance.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#60] Updated some of the tags to reflect new and updated Success Criteria material.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#67] Further global grammatical fixes have been applied to improve the content quality.
    @codewordcreative
  • [#67] Success Criteria have accurate identifiers sans external resources like testability.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#73] Fixed an issue that caused Firefox's in-page search to suffer multiPage issues.
    @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#80] Fixed an issue that caused searching in multi-page view to not work correctly.
    @dontcallmedom
  • [#82] Fixed a couple of rogue full-document in-page search issues that triggered filtering.
    @AlexDawsonUK
Q1 2025 Release Notes (31st March 2025)

Additions:

  • A Jekyll configuration is provided for easy-to-read versions of the IG and WSG readmes.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • A ReSpec multiPage plug-in was created for W3C Specifications, so WSG now has pagination.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @hidde, @kazuhito-kidachi, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • New IG Readme, WSG Readme, Contributing & IE Policy to reflect new W3C status.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @ines-akrap, @mgifford, @timfrick, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • New Success Criteria for 2.4 on Sustainable Brand Development and asset management.
    @codewordcreative
  • New Success Criteria for 3.14 on Sustainable APIs that may be beneficial.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • New Success Criteria for 5.22 on Automated Tooling covering scraping technology.
    @codewordcreative
  • STAR JSON API has been published with techniques and test suite URLs.
    @AlexDawsonUK & @mgifford
  • [#15] A New Introduction section on Relationships to other specifications (and bodies) is included.
    @AlexDawsonUK & @TzviyaSiegman
  • [#17] New Success Criteria for 4.9 on Client VS Server covering Redundant processing.
    @jyasskin

Updates:

  • Additional Information sections were redesigned to increase interaction visibility.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Additional useful resources have been included within the specification.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Guideline Titles have been expanded to be more explanatory of the actionable SCs.
    @AlexDawsonUK & @torgo
  • The Laws & Policies document has additional legislation with references and fixes included.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Success Criteria for Guideline 2.17 now includes mentions of animation iterations.
    @codewordcreative
  • Success Criteria for Guideline 4.9 now include improved Protocol Usage compatibility.
    @ldevernay & @mgifford
  • Update to Guideline 4.2 to be more inclusive of both client and server-side.
    @ldevernay & @mgifford
  • WSG has been successfully transitioned from CG to the W3C IG repository.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#4] Update to Guideline 2.16 SC among others to remove language ambiguity.
    @timfrick
  • [#14] Guideline Descriptions relabeled as Intent and temporarily moved to Additional Information.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#16] Former Guidelines 3.18-19 have been merged into a single Guideline.
    @andreadavanzo
  • [#20] & [#24] Update to Guideline 3.7 SCs to improve the criteria robustness.
    @andreadavanzo & @hidde
  • [#21] Two Success Criteria for Guideline 3.19 have been merged into a single SC.
    @andreadavanzo & @hidde
  • [#23] Two Success Criteria for Guideline 5.20 have been merged.
    @andreadavanzo
  • [#27] Success Criteria for Guideline 3.2 now includes more detail about data types.
    @andreadavanzo
  • [#28] Success Criteria for Guideline 3.3 now includes modular front and back-end code.
    @andreadavanzo
  • [#32] Success Criteria for Guideline 3.7 are more extensively defined.
    @fullo, @hidde, & @kazuhito-kidachi
  • [#35] Success Criteria for Guideline 3.19 now includes avoiding polyfills in modern browsers.
    @AlexDawsonUK

Fixes:

  • Broken links and redirects have been resolved or removed.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Group Status changed from a CG Draft to a W3C Editors Draft.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Guideline headings are now in sentence case to improve readability.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Missing test suite references in the table have now been resolved.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • References to SustyWeb changed to IG (and URLs updated to match).
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • Resolved some issues with citation conventions being incorrect.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • SustyWeb Community links & specifications now have superseded notice.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @ianbjacobs, & @TzviyaSiegman
  • Versioning references removed to match living document status.
    @AlexDawsonUK
  • [#26] Resolved some issues with internal references to material being incorrect.
    @airbr
  • [#31] Multiple spelling and grammar fixes have been applied.
    @AlexDawsonUK, @codewordcreative, & @hidde

If you spot any new bugs, or have new content or ideas to include, submit an issue.

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