Web emissionsaudits & tracking
From simple websites to large, complex web estates. We audit and track web emissions using industry leading methodologies, from end user to data centre.
Eyes are turning.Questions are coming.
Clients, tenders, boards, procurement teams and customers are all starting to ask for this data. Some need it to meet a requirement. Some want it for a B Corp submission. Some have built a brand on environmental credibility and can’t afford for the digital side of it to go unexamined.
If this is a box you can’t fill in yet, and you’re buying time until you can, we can help.
Stay put.We’ll come to you.
You don’t have to move anything, change anything or do much of anything. We audit and track large estates running hundreds of sites across multiple CMS platforms and hosting vendors.
What you getto say afterwards
“We know where we are”
A full candid audit with total emissions estimates and robust data quality assessment.
“We have credible evidence”
Tracable, defendable figures backed by transparent published methodologies, no pay wall.
“We’re tracking our progress”
Whuth regular measurements we can track your direction of travel.
Why use us
You can get a number for a page from any free tool in minutes. The problem arrives later, when someone questions whether that is representative of your site and whether the numbers stack up defensibly.
One parameter is not a measurement
Almost all tools (free and paid) run on models that infer emissions from a single proxy, usually data transferred. This has been a reasonable first step for the industry, but these tools are not credible measurements and they lack the fidelity for digital teams to act upon.
One page is not an estate
Most tools test a homepage. Some test a set of pages. Your traffic doesn't sit on one or a few pages. We take a representative sample using advanced (and interesting!) statistical techniques.
A 100% renewable claim does not mean “no emissions”
You may have seen claims that vendors “run on” or “are powered by” 100% renewables. These describe a purchasing arrangement (almost 100% of the time) and say nothing about how much energy your hosting platform actually consumes, or what it emits. For reporting, it's smoke and mirrors.
Someone will ask how you got that number
Once a figure appears in a tender response or an annual report, it's your claim. A figure you can't trace is no use as evidence and dangerous as a claim. It won't satisfy a procurement team, and it will attract attention from anyone looking for a greenwashing story.
Don’t takeour word for it
Our methodologies are open
Published, versioned, and available to read before you buy. If you want to check our working, we would rather you did.
We help write the standards
Our founders are recognised industry experts, invited by W3C and the Green Software Foundation to contribute to the latest industry standards.
Measurement is our business
We began with an Innovate UK grant to research energy measurement of software processes. Measuring the web is not a side product or a lead generation tool. It defines the business.
Independently assessed
An independent assessment from the Green Web Foundation on how these methods differ and why it matters, and the Green Software Foundation's own comparison of web emissions tools.
How an auditworks
We scope it
One call to establish estate size, hosting arrangements and your reporting deadlines. You get a fixed price before any work starts.
We collect the data
We sample your end user analytics and visit your site running interaction tests whilst measuring resource activity. We request infrastructure data together from your vendors (hosting, CMS, cloud etc).
We model it, you get the report
We then crunch the numbers through our component-level energy models, manufacturing data sheets and global carbon intensity data. You get the written findings and your overall impact estimates delivered with a walkthrough from an expert member of our team.
Questions
We can turn single site reports around in 1 to 2 working days, providing your hosting vendor comes back with data. Larger estates with more vendors generally take a few weeks.
No. The audit stands on its own and most of our audit clients host elsewhere.
We do often find hosting vendors unresponsive, or unable to provide your data. Equally, we have found great vendors who really engage to help you. Either way it is part of what the audit uncovers, which is where you actually stand. Regardless of hosting, we will still measure everything else, and the report will reflect the real world truth and hide nothing. If you do have a hard reporting requirement we can work with you to use other modelling techniques as well. There is always a way.
Yes. Agencies run these for their clients under their own name and their own branding, and we stay in the background or join the client call, whichever you prefer.
Either. Most start with a benchmark and move to annual or quarterly tracking once there is something to compare against.
Our audits establish where the impact sits. What we've learned from running these is that business context is everything. Canned recommendations are practically useless and sometimes plain annoying. It is far more effective to present the facts, and we always offer a complimentary 30 minute handover call to talk through options. From there we can be as involved as you like, though generally devs, designers and content owners know what to do off the bat.
If you are paying us to audit, we want you to benefit from it. Perhaps someone has asked you for a figure or you want to position web sustainability in your comms in some way (pitching, marketing?). Or you've seen competitors do similar. If you read this far, we can probably help - so reach out for a chat, we're very friendly :)