The internet, carbon emissions and Tickbox

This is a companion article to The internet, carbon emissions and what you and tech companies can do.

At Tickbox we care about the environment of course, that’s why our hosting platform is supported by our partners UKFast – who’s services are 100% carbon neutral.

UKFast were actually one of the first UK hosting companies to achieve the PAS 2060 standard. Every server we use, every hard drive that is added, we get peace of mind that not only is your data secure, but it’s run on nothing but air, wind and water. If you’re looking for hosting, you can check out our packages here.

Coding/Frameworks Philosophy and reducing data transfer from websites

One of the biggest issues facing many developers and site owners is how to make content freely available, whatever the connection – be it Superfast broadband or rural connection speeds which can barely reach a single megabit. Making sure we find ways to make the website more efficient and connectable is critical.

One of the most effective ways to reduce data transfer from our websites is to reduce our page weight from all web pages. Reducing page weight has numerous benefits, including:

• Faster page loading and response times
• Improvements to user experience
• SEO ranking improvements
• Reduced data consumption for those with limited or speed related issues

At Tickbox we strive to make sure that we leave no stone unturned in our quest for making our sites as efficient as possible. Whether this is through caching or using the correctly sized images, but our code is always written with cleanliness, efficiency and maintainability in mind. Using services such as GIT (version control), SASS, minification and compression to help us.

Our development approach is to re-use as much as we can. Often during a website’s lifetime, functionality will come and go. If you are removing elements, then remove it completely. There is no need to keep CSS or JavaScript elements in place taking up unnecessary space in transit.

Throughout the entire lifecycle of a website, the best rule to follow is, “If in doubt, leave it out”.

We’ve recently finished work on another client’s website and refactored their WordPress website which had a mixture of styles and features that could have been better optimised.

Using SASS, a CSS rendering library, we were able to re-factor the site top to bottom, without rebuilding it. Making it ruthlessly efficient in terms of styles written, responsively driven (from mobile upwards) and removing old/dead styles no longer needed or required.

By spending time analysing the original site issues and identifying the key areas, via our audits and website analysing tools, we were able to:

• Reduce the number of connections being made to the website
• Reducing the size of all images and fonts by enabling compression and expiration headers
• Reduced the weighting of scripts and styles

All this resulted in a reduction in page speed, by over half a second and reducing the page size by over 1Megabyte.

Tickbox Website Audits

Regular health checking of your website is important. Your car has an annual MOT, so why shouldn’t your website? Audits aren’t hard to do and help identify key areas of your site. What is good, what can be improved?

Running these checks could save you £££ in the long-run with hosting or developer fees. With the latter building upon legacy code and, in their wake, not knowingly leaving legacy code.

As part of our monthly routine, with all of our clients, we run website audits on a monthly basis to help us identify and plan key updates to any website. Changes can range from small updates to relatively big changes. However, these are all discussed before any work is undertaken.

In recent update we did for a health organisation we were able to decrease page size and also decrease page loading time by over 50%, with only 15 minutes work. Smaller page sizes equals lower bandwidth. It’s a win-win situation.

Tickbox Trees

As part of our ongoing effort to help and support our world, Tickbox are pledging to do their part for the environment. For every hosting package that is sold or renewed we will be donating some of our proceeds to charities to help us plant trees in the UK to help restore our depleted forests, preserve our wildlife and help combat global warming.

Together, we can make the world a cleaner and greener place.