Your website
uses carbon.
Spend it wisely.
Building a light website is not the hard part. The hard part is every decision that makes it heavy: another hero image, another tracking script, a video on the home page, a form instead of an email address. Each one makes sense to someone. Nobody weighs them against each other. We help large organisations make those decisions on purpose.
Digital sustainability inside most organisations is often a policy nobody can apply, because nothing tells the person adding a video to the home page what it costs.
What we help with
- A weight budget. How heavy each kind of page is allowed to be, set from what your visitors actually need, and written so your team and your agencies can work to it.
- Decision rules. Plain rules for the arguments that come up every week: images or more pages, video or not, which third-party scripts earn their place, a form or an email address.
- Measurement you can report. Your website's carbon footprint is an output of decisions your teams already make every week, which is why we start with the decisions rather than the number. Most of a website's emissions fall in scope 3, and unlike most of scope 3 they can be estimated from the outside, by anyone, at any time. That makes the figure useful for carbon reporting where the point is to show a direction of travel, provided the same method is applied each time so the numbers can be compared. We report website emissions as a range, with the method set out, because a single number implies a precision this kind of estimate does not have. It is not a figure for statutory climate disclosures.
- What to ask for. Requirements you can put in a brief or a tender, so the next rebuild is lighter by design rather than by luck.
How it works
- We measure your site and show you where the weight comes from, page by page.
- One working session with the people who decide what goes on the website: marketing, digital, communications and whoever signs off on sustainability.
- A written weight budget and decision rules, in plain English, that your team keeps.
- We measure again six months later, so you can see what changed.
Why us
We measure in public. Every page of chur.co.nz shows its own weight at the bottom, analytics included, and the build refuses to publish a page over its limit. Every website we build is made the same way, so we know which trade-offs cost the least.
If you want it built as well
We also take on a small number of builds for larger organisations, to the same standard: light, fast, accessible and measured. We don't have to be the only ones building it. We're just as happy working alongside your own developers and digital team, so the site is built the right way and your people know how to keep it that way. Ask us.