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You can read Supercool’s Cultural Website Sustainability Benchmark Report from July 2025 here<\/span>.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n Internet use, emails and other digital tools are not carbon neutral. The internet relies on banks of servers with massive electricity needs for power and cooling. Minimising use is therefore an important way of reducing your environmental impact:<\/p>\n \u2022 Review the impact of your website. Change hosting and design can reduce the emissions it causes.<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 Educate staff on best internet, email and social media practice.<\/b><\/p>\n There are three key questions to ask when assessing the emissions a website produces:<\/p>\n \u2022 Is the website hosted in a data centre that uses fossil fuel electricity, or renewables?<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 How much content (in MB) is on there?<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 How much data gets transferred when the web page opens?<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 How many times are the website\u2019s pages viewed by its visitors over time?<\/b><\/p>\n You can watch a webinar by Supercool about reducing your website’s carbon footprint here<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u00a0To test the carbon emissions of your website, use a Website Carbon Tool. If your host\u2019s servers aren\u2019t powered by green energy, switch to more planet-friendly hosting options. The first step to reduce a website\u2019s carbon emissions is to host it in a data centre which uses 100% renewable energy instead of fossil fuel electricity.<\/p>\n \u2022 Calculate your emissions with a tool such as <\/b>Website Carbon<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/p>\n \u2022 Contact current technical and digital providers and ask for their environmental and energy reports and what they are doing to address their impacts.<\/b><\/p>\n The intensity of website carbon emissions relates to the number of visitors and the content they\u2019re accessing. It\u2019s particularly important that large organisations, with high numbers of website visitors, pay attention to their website emissions.<\/p>\n To further achieve carbon-reducing optimisation, the key is to make the content shared as light as possible \u2013 most commonly by compressing any images and videos that are displayed and making their file sizes smaller.<\/p>\n \u2022 The target threshold for the entire page of a normal business website should not need to be any larger than 1MB.<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 For more ideas on reducing impact, see <\/b>here.<\/b><\/span><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n <\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n <\/b><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n Encourage staff:<\/p>\n \u2022 To delete emails that won\u2019t be needed again and prevent them being stored unnecessarily.<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 To use phone instead of a laptop for quick Google searches, as it uses less energy.<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 To unsubscribe from email newsletters and mailing lists that are no longer needed.<\/b><\/p>\n \u2022 To use Google Drive and Google Photos (or similar) for cloud storage.<\/b><\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n <\/b><\/p>\n Consider the energy use of AI tools, especially as they become increasingly used in the workplace. You may be interested in reading SustAIn<\/a>, an online\u00a0 magazine about sustaianble AI. If you are working on creating an AI Policy you may be interested in reading the Arts Council England case study here.<\/a><\/p>\n <\/strong><\/p>\n Tools for tracking your own website or digital impact:<\/strong><\/p>\n The Green Web Foundation<\/a><\/p>\n Website Carbon<\/a><\/p>\n Further guidance can be found here:<\/strong><\/p>\n Culture Hive<\/a><\/p>\n <\/i>Julie’s Bicycle Report on Sustainability in the Age of Digitial Culture<\/a><\/p>\n Art Fund,<\/a> THE HERDS and Manifesto\u2019s new resource: Tech \u2018Might\u2019 Save Us: A Low Carbon Approach to your work online<\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n If you are an individual artist, you can access a free low-carbon website builder with Fast Familier<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n With thanks to Katie Parry of Supercool<\/a> for input into this Toolkit page.\u00a0<\/i><\/p>\nStaff Digital Use<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Artifical Intelligence<\/b><\/h2>\n
Tools<\/strong><\/h2>\n