Through business activities, every company’s trying to implement changes allowed them, to reduce negative impact on the environment.
Through investing in new technologies over the years Andrews Fasteners Limited has worked on that principle.
One of the least aspects that companies are taking into consideration is their websites.
You may not be aware, but websites are making a huge impact on the environment.
Powerful servers and huge computing power used to display final content to the user have a huge implication in emitting heat and CO2 to the atmosphere.
Websites that load slow draw more energy
Over the years we have invested in our website to ensure our loading is as efficient as possible.
Through implementing an eco-friendly website design, we were able to reduce significantly the loading speeds.
We also worked closely with a new service provider to make this happen.
However, serving our website still required a huge amount of computing power which is due to the engine that the website is using - like ours - WordPress.
Websites that do frequent server requests draw more energy
WordPress is known for its dynamic approach. In most cases, when you visit one page of our website today, and then that same page in the future, that page needs to be regenerated once again to display that same content. This is causing unnecessary server requests.
We have implemented over the years various cache techniques to reduce the need of regenerating that same page when the content didn’t change. This reduced massively its negative impact on the amount of energy which is needed to display content.
However, we are always looking forward to doing even more!
Going static, going green
When you operate a website that displays new content very often, typically through a single day, the dynamic approach like using WordPress may make sense.
However, the majority of companies homepages are not like that.
Apart from online shops, the information about the company, their product or services didn’t change very often.
Updated once every couple of months that is standard in this type of website.
We are proud to serve our content to a large number of users worldwide every month. The numbers are impressive and they are increasing each month.
Some information on our website, which is gaining a lot of attention, does not require to be edited very often and still present accurate information. This is why we looked into implementing a better approach to displaying content on our website.
What’s important is, apart from making our website blazing fast, was that our visitors will not notice the difference.
We resign from WordPress and replaced with go static with Static Site Generator (SSG) called Hugo. Pages on our website, once generated, do not need to be regenerated again.
Together with advanced caching techniques, we have reduced our impact on the environment significantly.
Without our information, you would barely notice any changes, which is good.
We keep the design of our website as it was, so users don’t need to adjust to new navigations and will be able to find information fast, as before.
Of course, we made some tweaks and unifications in the layout to make it more user friendly and we hope you will appreciate it.
Privacy
Going green and going static allowed us to reshape our privacy policy about our website.
Apart from brief information about the number of visitors on our website which we gather, we reduce the amount of data that needs to be stored with it. It’s better for the environment (less data, less energy) but also for our users, who don’t need to worry about hidden tracking techniques, or that information about what they are doing on our website will be used for purposes that they may not agree with.
Also, as there is no data that needs to be unnecessarily processed, there is no risk that it will be hacked and data will leak, causing a significant impact on our business, our users’ visitors and customers.
We are proud to promote ourselves in forward-thinking in a wide range of our business activities. We hope, that you, as a visitor, supplier or our customer will appreciate it in the same way as we do.
Dariusz Więckiewicz
Quality Manager