Going all in for a sustainable website

Far-reaching requirements for sustainable web design

"Ecology has a holistic approach to sustainability," says Christina Udby Hansen, Chief Consultant at the Innovation Centre. "We work with the fact that several considerations often need to interact and balance each other, such as climate, biodiversity and animal welfare. We have also taken this approach in the development of a new platform, which is why it was important for us to find a partner who wanted to go into this with an openness and willingness to try new things. We had some far-reaching sustainability requirements for our website, and to some extent this has been new territory for both us and Illumi."

"For example, we made a decision not to use third-party cookies," Christina Udby Hansen continues. "We've decided this because we don't want to force everything on our users that they don't really want. But of course, such a choice has some consequences. For example, without third-party cookies, we can't use a tool like Google Analytics, so we've had to find other ways to collect useful user data."

Web accessibility: A website for everyone

Respect for users is also expressed in other contexts on icoel.dk. For example, through a focus on web accessibility. Web accessibility is about making your website accessible to all users, including those who are visually impaired, dyslexic or have other types of disabilities. Illumi has ensured that the Innovation Centre's website complies with the EU web accessibility guidelines. This includes making it easy to use screen readers to read content aloud. And users with motor disabilities can navigate the site without using a mouse.

Limiting your website's energy demand with active choices

Of course, sustainability is about much more than cookies and web accessibility. Most people probably associate "sustainable websites" first and foremost with low energy consumption. Therefore, icoel.dk has of course implemented many energy-saving measures. For example, images are compressed as much as possible and the use of video is kept to a minimum.

"Video is one of the most energy-intensive elements of a website, but it’s essential for sharing knowledge - especially for young farmers who prefer video over long articles. We often balance the trade-offs to choose the best solution in each case."

Christina Udby Hansen, Chief Consultant at the Innovation Centre for Organic Farming

To minimise the load of videos, Illumi has ensured that videos are only played if users actively choose to watch them. In addition, Illumi has ensured that the videos are not by default streamed in a higher resolution than they appear on the website. This also minimises the climate impact.

Extra planning - but also greater user satisfaction

Of course, sustainable web design is not done with good technological choices alone. At the innovation centre, they are constantly working actively with sustainable initiatives and prioritising the extra planning - and the limitations - that come with it. Christina Udby Hansen gives an example: "We have decided not to change the website's supporting images very often. It takes more energy to load new images than to retrieve the same images from the cache when a user revisits our site. Therefore, as a general rule, we replace the main images every three months at most."

The fact that the images are also compressed as much as possible, together with the climate-friendly video handling, means that it takes less energy to load and host a page. This is not only beneficial for the climate, but also for the site's performance and thus for user satisfaction. As for hosting, the Innovation Centre's knowledge portal is hosted on "green servers" at Microsoft Azure, which uses renewable energy to power its data centres.

More than just a tick to be ticked off

It was clear from the beginning of the project that "sustainability" in the innovation centre was not just a box to tick. The demands on Illumi have therefore also been very high.

When we met Illumi, we felt they would enjoy a collaboration that challenges the “usual suspects.” Of course, some things turn out not to be possible, but we wanted to explore the options - and Illumi has been great at that.

Christina Udby Hansen, Chief Consultant at the Innovation Centre for Organic Farming

How well icoel.dk performs today

A year after the launch, the innovation centre commissioned an external expert to analyse the website's climate impact and make suggestions for improvement. The analysis showed that the website performs superbly in terms of energy consumption. If it wasn't for the use of video, it would be among the 10% most climate-friendly websites in the world.

In addition, the website currently scores 98/100 points on the web accessibility scale in a Google Lighthouse report*. As mentioned in the case, web accessibility is all about making sure everyone can use your website, and the innovation centre has succeeded in doing just that.

*Google Lighthouse is a free tool to measure the quality and performance of a website by analysing factors such as speed, accessibility and search engine optimisation. Check how well your own website performs by adding the Lighthouse tool to your Chrome browser. Or we can do the measurement for you.