GreenSEO

The internet, if a country, would be the world's 7th largest emitter of CO2 pollution. It is on track to be the 2nd by 2040 on its current trajectory*. It is time to change. SEOs can play a key part in helping to clean up the web. Sustainable web designers are showing us the way with the sustainable web manifesto. It's time for us to act, it's time for us to change, it's time for us to drive impact to clean up the web.

> Join our LinkedIn group, and stay in the know on the latest GreenSEO happenings.

This website’s purpose will be to empower, connect and give you SEOs the tools you need to create a meaningful and long-lasting impact on creating a carbon-friendly internet.

This website has been created to be as carbon-friendly as possible in its design, and construction. There are so many things that you can do to take action to make the internet a greener place. We hope some of these ideas and toolsets will help you make them believe that change is possible, whether it's wholesale changes or through incremental marginal gains.

Together we make a difference. Together we can succeed.

*[Source Worldometer]

The GreenSEO Manifesto

• We will do all within our power and influence to make the web a greener place.
• Each month we pledge to take one action each towards this goal.
• We share, open source, support and help advise each other.
• We talk to people about the impact of the web on the environment and invite like-minded souls to join the green SEO movement.

Top 10 most impactful next steps

1. Baseline your current position - measure your impact
2. Create a roadmap / get buy-in
3. Swap to a renewable energy-hosted data centre
4. Deal with images & and videos - any media files / PDFs
5. Archive or remove redundant content via a content audit
6. Focus on Core Web Vitals & Page Speed
7. Address crawl budgets & and crawler activity
8. Implement dark mode (or toggled dark mode)
9. Apply eco practice for design, fonts & accessibility
10. Improve the UX flow/customer journey

Green SEO Resources

We have gathered resources and tools to help you do your jobs and make the web greener. This is just the start of creating open source toolkits for you to create impact.

Do you have a great resource tool to help green up the web? -Send us an email hereso we can post it up or try to help.

Green SEO Resources

• Sustainable Web Manifesto: How to explain the issue of the need to create a sustainable web very simply.
• What is sustainable web design? More information but very well put together. If you had to send a client any one link, this is the one. It also links to the manifesto early on.
• The Green Web Directory: This is a list of certified green web hosts.
• 20 ways to make your website more energy efficient: Leading the way in sustainable web design and providing toolsets, WordPress themes and much more. Buy the book. All salute Tom & Wholegrain Digital.
• Digital Declutter for Businesses: Tackles an overall approach to digital sustainability for a social business.
• 14 Rules for Faster-Loading Web Sites: For conversations with developers, ask if they've heard of Steve Souders. He's a legendary early web dev, he wrote the book on web optimization.
• The climate impact of ICT: For academics, this is the most comprehensive paper on how bad the internet is for greenhouse gas emissions.
• Green Software Brighton: A Brighton based community dedicated to digital sustainability.

Green SEO Tools

• Benchmark: Ecograder and Website Carbon Calculator cover most of the important sustainability metrics.
• Digital Beacon is a great tool for benchmarking and building recommendations:
• Treo Site Speed is a good overall website performance test and more legible than Google Lighthouse.
• Fonts Squirrel's Webfont Generator is an industry standard font compressor. Even if you don't change the settings at all you'll cut down ~75% of the weight, no reason not to use it.
• Images: Before you resort to online image compressors, the best image compression tool on the market is built into Photoshop and Illustrator. It's the old 'save for web' (Alt + Ctrl + Shift + S). You can see the compressed image in real-time so you can compress it to a level of quality you're comfortable with.
• Once you have your PNG or JPEG, convert it to WebPfor even more savings. Or this one for converting SVGs.
• For a unique look, look at dithering. Some clients won't love the way this looks, it’s super cool and a very powerful technique.
• Use modern protocols such as HTTP3 - this tool checks for HTTP2 and this one checks for HTTP3
• Use modern compression such as Brotli - this tool checks to see if a site supports Brotli

Learnings

Sharing our learnings on the way from our successes - so you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Feel free to share with us your learnings here.

• User polls (internal or external) are very powerful to get stakeholders on board for changes.
• Start small, then push out.
• Try an incremental, marginal gains approach if resistance will be high - archive pages in dark mode is a great way into this.
• A dark mode on/off switch helps with ‘how will it look’ jitters.
• Use data to contextualize your argument e.g. page CO2 weight of your pages vs the competition provides a compelling argument for change and is VERY powerful.
• Internal people are very up for this - find friends and get the CSR & Sustainability teams on board.
• We talk to people about the impact of the web on the environment and invite like-minded souls to join the green SEO movement.

Problems to solve

We have many, many questions and problems to solve - send us them here so we can post them up or try to help.

About GreenSEO

GreenSEO was formed whilst three people met at the Brighton SEO conference. A talk delivered by Stu Davies on How the internet impacts the planet and what to do about it sparked Will & Rowan to approach him and they agreed on a meetup.

Founders:

• Stu Davies (Creative Bloom)@stu_daviesuk
• Will Barnes (ReedPop)@willdropphoto
• Rowan Chernin (Cisco)@surfthechairman

GreenSEO meetups:

Brighton: Every second Wednesday(ish) at the Brunswick Pub, BN3 1JF.

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To keep this site light, we have built it using the following tech:

• HTTP/3, TLS 1.3 and HSTS
• No tracking, images or favicon
• CloudFlare caching
• GitHub Pages
• Tutanota email