Sustainable Web Design, Now and in the Future

Ronald: Welcome to another episode of Woo Visions, where we discuss and discover what the future will hold for in this case, WooCommerce. I’m joined here by my co-host Kathy. Kathy, welcome.

Kathy: Good to see you, Ronald. How are you doing?

Ronald: I’m great. I’m really good. Thank you very much. And we’re joined by our guest Tom Greenwood, who’s the CEO and also co-founder of Wholegrain Digital. An agency that just marked their 15th anniversary here in London or based in London but I think you’re very global. Tom, if you don’t mind to share a little bit in a nutshell your last 15 years of Wholegrain Digital and what Wholegrain Digital actually is?

Tom: Sure. So thanks for having me on the podcast. Yeah, 15 years in a nutshell, so Vineeta, my wife and I founded Wholegrain in 2007, really to use design and technology like digital technology for good. So working with organizations, doing something positive in the world, helping them get the best out of the web and in along the way, trying to run our business in a responsible way, socially and environmentally responsible. We certified as a B Corp exactly five years ago. And really as part of going through that process, we actually started asking ourselves deeper questions about the environmental impact of the products that we design and build. And learned all about the environmental impact of digital technology and that’s sort of become really a specialism of ours over the last few years that we’ve done a lot of work, trying to raise awareness around the environmental impact of digital technology and what some of the solutions might be. So, yeah, I think that’s kind of brings us up to speed.

Ronald: I think that’s a beautiful summary. So what led you to that approach of working with well, sustainable and with these sustainable companies and maybe what came first? Did they come to you or you approached them? How did it sort of start up?

Tom: Yeah, so I mean, it came sort of before Wholegrain, really. I actually studied product design at university as a physical product design, not digital product design. And I was really interested in environmental issues and I kind I’ve wanted to see how could I reconcile these two things of like designing stuff that’s going to be made in a factory and shipped around the world and probably thrown away. And actually wanting to do something with my life and my career that was kind of environmentally responsible. So that was like a big research area for me at university and in the first few years of my career, and then I kind of latched onto digital really as kind of stuff I was doing on the side and suddenly started thinking, you know what? This is really exciting. Digital you can create value for people without the physical stuff and the environmental impact of it. So that was one of the things that got me interested in actually going down the kind of digital design route.

And then in terms of working with those types of organizations, doing something good, that was just who I wanted to work with. And in terms of dig they come to us. I mean, for the first few years, it was very hard. We had very few clients, but gradually they did come to us. I’m basically very bad at sales. I’m not a salesman and neither is Vineeta, so we really just kind of put our best foot forward, did good work and hoped that gradually would get a reputation and people would come. And here we are 15 years later and it seems to have worked out.

Ronald: How important was it to stick to your values? Because it’s so easy to, especially if you’re struggling and you have wages to pay, you have developers, you know not cheap. And to say, Oh, this is maybe not quite the company that ticks all the boxes, but let’s do it or to say, no, we are going to stick to our guns and this is who we are. And we are not going to work with this company, but stick to the ones we want to.

Tom: Yeah, it is really tough. Really early on, we introduced like a screening process where we would kind of grade projects that come in to us as briefs as green, grey or red. Green is like, this is going to do something really good in the world. We’re super excited to work on it. This is why we’re here. Red is like a list of things it’s like, we just don’t want to work on this stuff. And grey is like everything in between that doesn’t quite fit in a box, which actually often is most things in reality. But even with that, like the truth is it’s been really hard at various times over the years exactly as you say, like every business goes through like good times and hard times. And especially in the early years, when everything is hard, you can’t be quite as picky.

I think gradually as time went on, we got more confident about if we say no to things that we don’t feel right about, then like it’ll make space for good things that will come and we’ll build a reputation for doing that type of work and we’ll get more of it and that has played out, but there’s still been times when you have a little wobble and like you said, you got salaries to pay or you just get an offer that like is really good offer like financially and you’re like, I’m really struggling to turn this one down.

I did an estimate recently, I think we’ve turned down about 750,000 pounds worth of projects over the years in terms of like stuff that we just said no to on a kind of ethical grounds. So it’s like a big potential loss of revenue, but then at the same time we’ve still done okay like we got a thriving agency.

Ronald: That’s a good heading for block post, isn’t it? I mean, quick calculation will be probably a million dollars. So turning down a million dollars for-

Tom: Yeah. It is a million dollars, isn’t it? Yeah.

Ronald: Yeah.

Kathy: Do clients come to you wanting to have their website designed with green thought, you know sustainability in mind and how does that conversation start?

Tom: Yeah, that’s a great question. Like hardly anybody had ever really thought about the environmental impact of digital technology and websites. And certainly not clients that were coming to us. So when we first learned about it, we were very much taking the topic to them and trying to explain to them that this is something that we wanted to pursue within the project, alongside their other goals. And at first, like we got a lot of funny looks and they were a bit skeptical, but as long as we promised them there was no downside for them. They were like, well, look, you do whatever you want on the side. Let’s just deliver what we were asked for.

But interestingly, I think it was January last year, sorry no, January the year before last so 2020, we got our first ever brief that had a line in it that said, we want this website to be designed and developed in a way that has a low environmental impact, which was really exciting. And since then the number of briefs that are including that has increased steadily. And now when even clients that don’t include it, when we talk to them about it, they don’t seem as fazed by it. A lot of them they’re like, oh yeah, okay. We’ve kind of vaguely heard of this concept and if you’re going to do something about it that’s great. So I think it’s changing quite quickly and probably we are getting more of the clients. We’re probably not representative of the whole of the web design in agency market. We’re probably getting more of those clients that are already engaged in these issues, but it’s interesting how it does seem to be something that people are now thinking about.

Kathy: Do you feel like it’s a differentiator in your business that you can make a better connection with clients who are more environmentally focused that that drives the relationship more?

Tom: Yeah, I think so. I think any client, whatever it is they do, they want to work with people who understand what they’re about and care about, making what they do successful. And so I think for us, like the fact that our whole team is really passionate about environmental issues and human rights and so on means that those types of clients, when they come to us, they’re not just coming for technical expertise. Like they’re getting a team of people who really want to immerse themselves in the issues and help them on their journey and really kind of give it their best. So there’s a kind of an alignment of minds. Yeah.

Ronald: Nice. You’re educating your clients and also your team members, or maybe your team members are educating you, but you’re also educating the world on sustainable web design by writing a book, which you published I think top of my head sometime last year?

Tom: Yes.

Ronald: What led you to writing the book and what’s been the reception since, where you are now with it?

Tom: Yeah, sure. Well, you’re absolutely right about my team educating me. I sort of, I said, when it came out, I said to the whole team, “I feel a bit guilty that my name is on the front of this book. I’ve basically taken everything I learned from you guys and written it down.”

Ronald: I think they appreciate the credit you’re giving them now. So that’s on record, though.

Tom: Yeah. The reason for writing the book was the fact that like we’d learned about the environmental impact to digital technology is huge. And we’d learned about this few years back realized that almost nobody was talking about it. And to give you a little bit of context and your greenhouse emissions on the internet, somewhere between like two and 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions, which is got equal to, or greater than the aviation industry. And we all kind of were aware that there’s like a big environmental impact from aviation, and there’s a lot of attention going to that and the need to reduce it, but we’re not thinking at all about digital because it just seems like it doesn’t have an impact.

So that was something that once I became aware of it and the rest of the team became aware of it felt like we really need to like champion this cause and raise awareness of it. And I was aware of the fact that there’s loads of books out there on topics that are technical topics and like human-focused topics like accessibility and privacy and security and so on. But the whole kind of web design sphere seemed to be pretty quiet on the topic of environmental issues. And I just had this feeling, even though books kind of feel a bit old fashioned, I had this sense that if there’s a book on it’s a real issue and we should be talking about it. I love the bookstore book apart. They do loads of really interesting topics and they’re really easy to digest, so I pitched the idea to them and thankfully they were excited about it.

Ronald: Yeah. And what’s the reception been from the readers and the audience?

Tom: Yeah, it’s been really good actually. I was a bit nervous because I spent a lot of time writing it and editing it and it was quite a painful process. And then suddenly it got to like releasing it and I started having all these worries. It’s like, what if nobody reads it or worse still, people actually do read it and they think it’s rubbish. But thankfully the response has been overwhelmingly positive and seems to be selling pretty well. And I loads of people message me and say how they’ve been changing their design approach or their development approach. And they’ve been talking to their colleagues and so on. So that’s really exciting.

Kathy: And you have a website carbon calculator, and I just put my site in and I’m embarrassed. What kind of metrics are we looking at when somebody’s putting their website in and you’re looking at their impact on the environment?

Tom: Yeah, sure. So the two main metric, so the website carbon calculator is free for anybody to use and it gives you an estimate of energy and carbon emissions. So you can find that website, carbon.com. But the metrics that we’re using is basically we’re looking at like data transfer and we are looking at the energy source in the data center. And then we have an equation behind the scenes that kind of from that works out like how much energy would’ve been used in the data center, how much energy would’ve been used in the telecoms networks and how much would be used on the end users device. And then convert that into CO2 emissions.

There’s lots of nuance to that like you could go down the rabbit hole and you could develop a far more advanced formula. And we do have a more complicated formula that we can use internally, but for a quick dirty estimate that’s how it works. I mean, if you’re getting a really high score, the two things to look at would be like where are you hosting it? And does your host have a commitment to using renewable energy? And it’s just a straightforward question, just submit support ticket and ask them or just go to their website and search for it. Chances are, if they do, they will be wanting to tell you about it. If they don’t answer you or they give you a vague answer that probably mean they don’t.

And then on the other metrics, it’s really kind of about efficiency. So in terms of that score, it’s mainly about the size of the files that are being transferred. But in terms of the… If you get more detailed about it, you also could think about like how much computation is being done on the server and how much computation is being done on the end user’s device. And those things are super important.

Kathy: I was just going to ask if getting back eCommerce and WooCommerce, are there specific challenges to sustainability for merchants that they should be considering?

Tom: I think eCommerce is interesting because eCommerce is on this kind of intersection of the digital world and the physical world. So I think from a web point of view, most of the stuff that you do to make the actual eCommerce website more efficient would be the exact same things you’d do for a non eCommerce website. The only thing is probably that maybe a little bit different that you want to really look closely at is like dynamic content. And how can you like cache that in the most efficient or deliver that in the most efficient way, because you’ve got people adding things to a shopping cart and you may have like personalized content recommendations and these sorts of things that may not be quite so easy to cache. But most of it would be like the same approaches you’d take to any website, but then you’re at this intersection of the physical world so you’ve got this opportunity to like have an impact on what happens out there beyond the internet.

So can you guide people to make more efficient purchasing habits? Can you educate them about the environmental impact of the products they’re buying, of the shipping methods? Can you use the user experience designed to like kind of nudge them towards, Hey, this product’s actually more eco-friendly than that one or this slow shipping method is actually more eco-friendly than like air freighting it to you to get it there tomorrow. Yeah, so there’s lots of things you could do I think within the eCommerce experience that could have an impact on the physical world beyond just those like direct emissions of the website.

Thanks to our Pod Friends Trustpilot and OSTraining

Ronald: Have you seen innovative ways of sites or maybe you have an eCommerce site you’ve developed yourself where merchants used innovative ways to educate the user and to really have that from start to delivery have a low carbon impact as possible?

Tom: Yeah. One of the nice examples is Back Market. I don’t know if you guys have used Back Market, but what is it? It’s an eCommerce store for refurbished electronics. So in itself it’s like really good for reducing the environmental impact of digital technology, because it’s making easy to find good quality refurbished stuff, but on every product it tells you like the environmental benefit of buying this product over buying a brand new one. So if you want to buy an iMac, you can buy the refurbished one off Back Market, but it tells you like how much e-waste you’ll be saving by doing this instead of going to the Apple store and buying a brand new one. And I think it’s really, really simple like it’s not difficult to do, but that sort of thing I think is really nice.

I don’t see many like examples of this being done really well. I have seen some examples where like the shipping, for example, they’d highlighted like the carbon emissions of the shipping or have an option to like offset the emissions of shipping for example. Ah, I should have swatted up before this podcast there is a plugin that does this, that you can plug it into WooCommerce and it will actually like add a little option in WooCommerce so that you could offset the emissions from the shipping, which is really great.

Ronald: Yeah. But do you think people need to be rewarded or may feel good to opt for a better option? Is that the trick for merchants to push users to make the right decision?

Tom: I think so. I think to be honest, in an ideal world, all the options available would be super eco-friendly and all the shipping options would be man riding his bicycle to your house to drop it off or a girl riding a bicycle to your house doesn’t matter. But in reality, people want choice and merchants are offering them like a variety of options. And I think in that world actually like making people aware that like, Hey, you know what? There’s these two products are kind of equivalent, but this one is like more eco-friendly than that one or you know what? If you can just wait three days for this to be delivered instead of having it tomorrow, then that would actually have a benefit.

I think there’s somethings where you could nudge people and they would say, oh, okay, fair enough. Yeah, I’ll buy that other one and I’ll wait three days. But people don’t have that information if they don’t know there’s a difference they’ll just choose the one that I can have tomorrow and it sounds the most exciting. So I think there’s a big opportunity for merchants to take people on that journey.

Kathy: Are there any trends that you’re seeing in website design that’s specific to WooCommerce? Because I know WooCommerce does take more energy than say just standard WordPress site. There’s obviously a lot more going on computation. Are there things that merchants can do on the server side to make things more sustainable?

Tom: It’s a tricky question specific to WooCommerce, I think the number one thing you could do other than just like basic stuff that you probably do in your performance like having really good caching on the server. I think the one thing I’d say is just keep it as simple as possible because the thing about WooCommerce is it can grow into a beast, like a complicated beast, and that’s not just on the front end, but like in terms of all the options and all of the controls that you have in the back end for you to manage things can get really, really complicated. And the more complicated they’ve become at the end of the day, like the more computation is having to be done on the server.

So if you can keep it as close to the base model as possible, like the more you expand it there’s like a kind of compounding effect of computation required to cross pollinate all of these different options and visual like dashboard insight tools that you are putting in there for yourself and stuff. So I think the less of that stuff you can add, the more efficient it’s going to be and probably the easier it’ll be to maintain.

Kathy: Do you think that for a WooCommerce site owner who has a number of options for getting their storefront online, they could Shopify and there’s all kinds of other different ways of doing it. Is there anything within open source that lends itself more to sustainability in terms of more hosting choices, more control that makes it better in the long term for a choice for someone who’s a new merchant that’s trying to really make conscious choices about sustainability?

Tom: Yeah. Control is really the key thing. I mean the one benefit of things like Shopify is that if they did everything perfectly, everybody on that platform would benefit. And that would have like a really big impact because it scales. They change it once and everybody gets the benefit but on the other hand, if they don’t then the reverse is true. So I think the great thing about open source is that you can host it wherever you want. So you can ask your web host if they’re using renewable energy and whether it’s like the energy efficiency level of the data center, also like the location of the data center, because that makes an impact. If you are like targeting, especially with eCommerce, you might not be targeting a global audience, even if you have people all over the world visiting your website in reality, if you only ship to the US and you sell things within the US then that’s where your visitors are going to mostly be.

So you can make more specific choices about like where the data center is, but then you can also optimize it. So things like Shopify, I think they’re getting better at like front end efficiency I guess there’s more demand for things to be fast to load, but some of those platforms have been like historically quite inefficient. Whereas if it’s open source and you’ve got full control over it, you can optimize to the nth degree and there’s nobody stopping you from doing it. So I think that’s the big benefit is that you can take it as far as you want and really kind of get the best.

Ronald: But we are still looking into sort of more awareness and small changes and educating the web developer and maybe the merchant and educating the user or the buyer, we haven’t really started making a huge change. I mean, you’ve just shared that the web is equally polluting as the aviation industry. What are the big gains that you think we are not utilizing to make a much bigger impact on the environment?

Tom: Yeah. It’s trillions of tidy things. So the thing about the aviation is it’s like there’s a few big things that are like jetting up into the air and spurting out fumes and you can see them and you can be like, okay, we need to do something about that. The web its like it’s trillions of tidy little things. So it is so many websites with images that are not sized correctly and they’re not compressed and they’re not served in the right format. And they’ve got auto play videos on their homepage. And this is just like, I’m just a websites. Obviously, if you take the internet as a whole then these days that’s much more than just websites. And then you’ve got websites that without server caching and they’re hosted in a data center that’s like super inefficient and it doesn’t have a renewable energy supply and it’s not even near the target market.

There’s loads of people who like buy cheap hosting for American companies because there’s lots of American companies that offer really cheap posting, but they’re not actually in the US and their target audience is not in the US. I mean that in itself is super inefficient. It is like loads and loads of these little things and I think the thing that’s the big thing that’s missing is the conversation. Because I think once you start the conversation that, Hey, this is something we need to be thinking about. Then the little things actually are kind of relatively intuitive, most of them, they start falling into place, but as long as the conversation’s not on the table then we’re just kind of glossing over it and nothing gets done.

Kathy: It’s so easy when you start talking about sustainability, even beyond the web. You think about all of the big businesses and how they pollute or you know. How much of this two to 4% is Google’s fault or Amazon’s fault or whatever? And then, you know what I do for my particular website, which apparently needs to be moved. My one little choice compounded by all of the different web developers with a website or consulting with their clients and it feels like it’s a small decision that isn’t going to have a big impact and that the environmental concern is big business or that person or that organization. And it’s so easy to rationalize yourself into not making a change. How would you address that?

Tom: I’d say that it’s easy to think that way. And it’s true that the big businesses do have like a big chunk of the responsibility that they need to take. But equally the web is kind of unusual in the sense that a lot of it is made up of small websites made by individual people. Like the fact of 40% of the web is WordPress and yes, there’s a few like really big organizations using WordPress, but actually most of that is not huge organizations. It’s individuals, it’s small businesses. So actually a big chunk of the web is people like us and those things matter. Like individually that one little thing I’m doing makes a tiny difference, but if we all do it, it makes a big difference.

Ronald: Yeah. I think that’s a really important point, isn’t it? It’s education and that one thing, that one habit of finding the right host or scaling images that suddenly could be replicated, but it’s also viewed and loaded by hundreds and millions of users. And then suddenly that tiny little thing that we’ve done as a developer makes a huge impact. That’s actually a really powerful thing we all have in our hands.

Tom: We do. Exactly.

Ronald: So going in five, 10 years it is all about the future. It’s big vision, big thinking. Tom, what’s on your wishlist?

Tom: What’s on my wishlist? My wishlist is that 10 years from now, let’s say five years from now, my wishlist is that you can’t buy hosting that’s in a data center that doesn’t use renewable energy. Like we shouldn’t have to be making that choice, that should just be standard wherever you host it you know that’s taken care of. And then my next big wish after that is that like efficient practices are just kind of mainstream in web design and development. That that’s not something people think of as an extra, but it’s just normal because it’s not just the environment that’ll benefit, it’s user experience as well. It frustrates me. If you actually look at like average webpage load times over the last 10 years, they’re pretty much flat.

And if you look at like internet speeds over the last 10 years they’re through the roof and it’s like, hang on a minute. If you talk to anybody, they’re like, I love fast websites. I don’t like waiting for things to load. And then it’s like, well, but they’re not any faster than they were 10 years ago, like an average website and that’s insane like when you consider how much faster the internet it’s. So my hope for like five years time, 10 years time is that the internet will be genuinely blazingly fast. The internet speeds will be so much faster, let’s just not erode that benefit. Keep things more efficient than they are now and in the future the idea of waiting for a page to load will be a thing of the past.

Ronald: Yeah. I think that’s actually a really good thought. It’s all down to us individuals, but having tools and frameworks and plugins to help us guide making the right decisions. It is awareness. It is a conscious decision all the way through. Yeah. Hopefully in five, 10 years time we can get to that beautiful green web that we are actually desperately longing for, but-

Tom: And then we’ll be having a conversation about do you remember when we used to talk about greening the web?

Ronald: Well, I sincerely hope there was just a distant memories like, oh look you’ve achieved. And not thinking like we had a conversation and look what happened, nothing has happened or very little. So I think this it’s been really inspiring for me. Sometimes you just need to be told and be made aware of the things you can do. And I will certainly review a lot of my hosting decisions even if they’re a few years old, because I feel I owe that. I don’t know about you, Kathy, but it seems you’ll be doing the same. So we have a bit of homework to do.

Kathy: Definitely. I’m a little obsessed right now about changing my hosting setup.

Ronald: Well, you’re brave enough to actually put your site into the calculator and I’m even scared, so no. Well thank you very much, Tom. Thank you, Kathy and we’ll see and speak to you all next time.

Tom: Thanks guys.