Website Sustainability

This website was built with a focus on minimising its impact on the environment. It produces less CO2, requires less energy and is faster than ever before. It is cleaner than 95% of websites globally.

This page is written by Andrew Moore, developer of the ICR Research website.

• The amount of data sent to your browser to display the ICR Research website has been reduced by 97%
• The website is hosted using 100% renewable energy
• The estimated CO2 produced by the homepage has shrunk from 0.33g per view to 0.05g
• Improved Google's website speed score from 41 to 96 out of 100

The internet consumes 416.2TWh of energy per year - more than the UK - and is responsible for 4-5% of emissions globally. Does the aviation industry come to mind when asked which industries output high levels of pollution? Well, the internet is pollutes more than the aviation industry.

Your website is a factor when assessing the sustainability of your business. There are many ways to build and host a website, and the tools within reach to most are not considerate of the environment.

Many websites are built using AI-powered builder tools that are bloated with plugins and features that most of us do not need. They are cheap and easy, but have no consideration for the environment. Many websites have unnecessary visuals, uncompressed and adding nothing to the user experience, nor assisting in delivering the brand message. The web design industry is self-fulfilling and rarely stops to think "what do the visitors of this website actually want".

The ICR Research website truly asks the question, "what content will give visitors the most value" and aims to deliver that in the simplest way possible, excluding anything superfluous, while maintaining the brand style and values.

As a brief summary, the following methods were adopted to create an sustainable, eco-conscious website:

• Assess audience needs, match to content, remove anything unnecessary
• Only use images if they add value
• Compress images and use next-gen image formats like webp and avif rather than png and jpg to reduce file sizes
• Re-use assets rather than multiple versions of the same asset
• Use system-fonts where possible rather than requiring fonts to be downloaded
• Output no javascript in webpages by default
• Pre-build the website and host minimal HTML files rather than needing to generate the pages from a database on-the-fly when someone visits the website
• Host the content management system separately to the website
• Host the website on 100% renewable energy powered servers

* The stats at bottom of every page are not live, they are pre-tested. It would not be efficient to run this test on every page view.