Digital Sustainability Statement

Everything we do on the internet requires data transfer or storage of some sort, and therefore has a carbon footprint. Data is transferred between different servers, and these servers can use a lot of electricity. Many servers around the world are still using fossil-fueled power stations to keep them running, and are therefore not carbon friendly.

Jan Henry Design Ltd (JHDL) is committed to building strategically-planned websites that produce results, while remaining as lightweight and as carbon friendly as possible.

Lightweight, sustainable websites are built with best practices for clean code, and are optimised to reduce size as much as possible without reducing necessary functionality. They require less online hosting storage, and don’t transfer as much data during each page load. Because of this, they use less electricity and produce less carbon than heavier websites. This also saves your business money because you don’t need to pay for unnecessary storage on your website hosting. Sustainable websites also make for a more pleasant experience for end users (particularly those on mobile), as the website loads quickly and doesn’t chew up excess data on their end. Win-win for everyone.

As part of any website build process, I use the following:

• Fast cloud managed hosting that utilises green energy.
• A lightweight WordPress framework involving the GeneratePress theme, and GenerateBlocks on the Gutenberg page builder.
• Image compression to reduce the size of any images on the website to as small as possible, and making sure images only have the dimensions needed for the space they need to fill.
• Performance enhancements such as:
  • Disenabling of built-in WordPress features and settings that aren’t needed.
  • Lazy loading of images where possible.
  • Defer or delay loading of scripts so the site only loads what’s necessary.
  • Locally hosted fonts so that no third-party requests are made to Google Fonts or Adobe Fonts.
• Website caching and CDN. This reduces the amount of data that needs to be transferred each time a webpage is requested.

After each website build, trees are purchased from Trees that Count to offset the carbon footprint of the build process. This reduces the carbon footprint of building the site, helps the environment, and gives all round warm fuzzies from doing something good.