Sustainability statement

Website sustainability

We are committed to making Sustainability Support for Education as sustainable as possible. We are taking these steps to reduce the website’s environmental impact.

Design decisions

We keep image use to a minimum in order to reduce page load times, lowering CO2 emissions.
We use a minimal number of fonts and variations, so users don’t have to load more font files.
We will be reviewing our content on a regular basis, to ensure it’s relevant and still required for our audience.

Technical decisions

We follow the Green Software Foundation methodology when considering our hardware and energy use.
For hardware efficiency, we use a serverless architecture and headless content delivery to provide compute on demand rather than always on. By using serverless, we can statically generate our content ahead of time and deliver to our users via a content delivery network (CDN) bringing additional caching and security features.
We’ve chosen to host our website in the UK, where our target users are based. This reduces the distance of travel for data.
We only use one active environment during development, so that we only introduce them when necessary.
For energy efficiency, we optimise our images into appropriate sizes. We use colour and SVGs for design impact instead of images, and these are loaded when the user starts to scroll and interact with them. Where we do use raster images, we optimise them into formats like WebP and AVIF.
We limit the use of third parties and additional dependencies on our website, to reduce the transfer of data required (see our privacy policy for partners used).
We’re avoiding the use of video, and will never autoplay video based content to reduce unnecessary bandwidth consumption.
In the interest of transparency, and as a challenge to ourselves, we are making a commitment to ensure all pages of our website are less than 1MB data transfer, which we are roughly equating to a target of below 0.5g CO2e per new visit, by using CO2.js to translate page weight to website emissions. We regularly use WebPageTest carbon control to check that we are under the target. We’ll be using a combination of these tools to verify these metrics on release, and aim to keep these as low as possible for future iterations.
- Note that since the above results are based on transfer size, whilst it is a helpful metric to measure our impact, there are limitations and we will be looking at ways in which we can improve our calculations and better understand emissions from a hosting sense too.
Traffic from malicious actors or ‘bad’ bots is monitored and actively suppressed, to reduce energy consumption and free up bandwidth expended on valueless requests.

Updated 20/06/2024