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A brief history
We first introduced our Certified Green Website badge back in 2019, as a way of helping our clients get recognition for the positive step they had taken to move their site to our green hosting, website optimisation and tree planting service.
In the past, this badge on all our client websites has linked to a central page on our site which explains that a website displaying this badge is:
- Powered by 100% renewable energy
- Optimised to further reduce its emissions
- Donating at least 1 tree to be planted every month
- Helping to lift villagers around the world out of poverty
Internally, we’ve always proactively measured and kept track of the reductions in carbon emissions we’ve achieved through our website hosting and optimisation work for clients, and this dataset ended up being a critical component of our qualification for the Resource Conservation IBM (Impact Business Model) during our successful B Corp certification.
Sustainability evolution
The sustainability landscape has shifted significantly since that point back in 2019, and in particular the Green Claims Code has been introduced in the UK which requires businesses to be very specific and unambiguous about badges and labels of this sort, in order to avoid the risk of (actual or potential) greenwashing.
In light of the evolving landscape and regulations, we have now developed and enhanced our certification into a much more specific and data-driven format – and any website displaying our badge now links to a personalised certification page containing a summary of the site’s specific website carbon data.
Conveniently, the creators of the Website Carbon tool (which we’ve used and been big fans of ever since it was first released back in 2018) also announced a significant change to their tool’s methodology towards the end of 2023, which now makes it much easier to understand a website’s carbon performance.
In their own words:
Inspired by the energy efficiency ratings of household appliances, vehicles and buildings, we wanted to create a similar system for websites. Energy labelling has been effective in communicating varying levels of efficiency and the format of colour coded ratings is now well recognised in many parts of the world. That’s why we’ve chosen this medium as a way to inform, educate and inspire the creators and owners of websites to strive for better environmental performance.
We set our benchmark for a good rating (A+ to E) as any site that falls below the global average CO2 emissions for desktop web pages. Ratings go from A+ (very efficient) to E (which is still better than global average). Any website with emissions that exceed the global average receives an F rating.
Wholegrain Digital
As low-carbon website specialists with our company mission* focused on radically reducing the Internet’s environmental impact, achieving a top A+ / A rating is of course a top priority.
Our own erjjio website achieves an A+ and is “cleaner than 95% of all web pages globally” according to the website carbon tool.
Aligning (ambitiously) with the new methodology
While a rating of anything from E up to A+ is technically considered by the tool to be a “good” rating as it means that the site’s carbon emissions are lower (i.e. better) than average, we wanted to be more ambitious with the eligibility threshold for our own updated certification.
In order to be eligible for our Certified Green Website badge from now on, a website must achieve a carbon rating of at least B or better. Since most websites usually get updated regularly, we also aim to review and re-certify each website’s badge every 3 months.
In addition, when our CGW badge is displayed on an eligible website it now links to a personalised, data-driven certification profile page on our website, rather than the central CGW page that we’ve used in the past (mentioned above).
This is how our own certification page looks – and all eligible client sites displaying the CGW badge now have their own equivalent certification profile page too.
How do we achieve top ratings?
Getting to the top A+ or A carbon rating is not a straightforward task for most business websites – to achieve the former, the total page size currently needs to be lower than around 0.4MB (400KB) and for the latter it must be a little below 0.8MB (800KB). Bear in mind that we often encounter websites built by other people which contain single images larger than 400KB, let alone video files which are usually much larger.
So over the last few months, we’ve been innovating and fine-tuning our optimisation techniques even further, and carefully testing and applying configuration enhancements to all our client sites. The vast majority of them now achieve either an A+ or A rating.
The key techniques that we’ve fine-tuned and enhanced include:
- Switching to a different tool for WebP image conversion, which is more comprehensive and powerful
- Subsetting font files to remove a lot of unnecessary weight which is often included by default for non-English languages and special characters
- Switching to variable weight fonts instead of using separate font files with specific weights (when multiple weights are needed / used by the website)
- Disabling a popular library called Font Awesome, which people typically need in order to access and use a handful of social media logos, but which also includes hundreds of other unnecessary icons by default too – and then replacing this with our own custom icon packs which contain just a small number of critical icons
- Disabling other bits of default code within WordPress which aren’t typically needed
- Unloading or delaying surplus JavaScript which would otherwise load by default and either isn’t needed at all, or isn’t needed in order for the page to load
Another key benefit of these optimisation techniques is that they aren’t just great for reducing carbon – they simultaneously make websites faster, which is great for SEO and user experience (UX) too! 🚀
Onwards
We’re excited to launch this enhanced version of our badge and certification, offering a clearer, data-driven approach to tracking and reducing website carbon emissions. By setting more ambitious standards and continuously refining our optimisation techniques, we aim to help support your own climate action. Together, we can drive change and make the digital landscape more sustainable, one website at a time.
If you have any questions, thoughts or feedback about this update, please feel free to get in touch – we would be very happy to chat. We would also love to connect on LinkedIn and continue the conversation! You can follow our company page here and connect with our founder Ben too – he would love to say hi 👋
* P.s. you can read more about our progress towards our people and planet goals in our annual Impact Reports.
FAQ
Are there any fees for the new certification?
No, unlike various other certification providers there are no direct fees (nor any plans to introduce them) for this updated certification system, other than our Green Hosting standard plan pricing – hosting the site with erjjio remains part of the badge’s core eligibility requirements.
If you’re not an erjjio client yet and you’d like to get your website certified, we will first need to review the site’s current performance and optimisation opportunities – the best way to get started with this is to request a FREE website health check. We will offer you our free advice and it might be that the site already meets the eligibility requirements and / or could be improved relatively easily using our standard optimisation toolkit. If your website would require a significant amount of custom development work however, we may need to offer an up-front, no-obligation quote for the suggested work.
We use a number of premium, paid plugins for WordPress as part of our updated optimisation toolkit, and we are happy to (legitimately) share our agency / developer licences with erjjio clients without you needing to buy your own. (Please refer to clause 23 of our Terms & Conditions for a bit more detail on this policy).
My site isn’t getting an “A” score yet – can I improve it?
If your site is eligible and displaying the badge with a personalised certification profile already, but is getting a B rating rather than an A+ or A, the reason is most likely that your website is a little heavier than average and doesn’t have as much opportunity to reduce size. Typically this is due to e.g. the site displaying a significantly larger number of images than average, using automatic background video, or having WooCommerce features enabled on the homepage which can’t be removed without breaking critical functionality.
If you’re an erjjio hosting client but we didn’t build your website and aren’t involved in its maintenance (other than the provision of hosting) then we may not have been able to optimise and certify your site so far – we will contact you proactively to discuss and help with this, following this announcement.
If you’re not an erjjio client yet but are interested in getting some help and becoming certified, please get in touch – we would be delighted to hear from you.
Can you certify any type of website?
We are WordPress specialists and we work exclusively with this platform, so if you’re using a different type of platform (e.g. Squarespace, Wix, Webflow, Shopify etc) then unfortunately we will not be able to offer you our certification. However, we may still be able to advise you on how to improve your site’s performance – either through a quick informal chat or potentially through some billable consultancy work. Also, we frequently work on website projects which involve a full revamp and shift away from DIY platforms such as the above, onto WordPress instead – so perhaps that route might be of interest to you too. Please feel free to get in touch – we’d be delighted to chat.
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