Amsterdam
Barbara Strozzilaan 1011083 HN Amsterdam
Netherlands+31 10 307 7131info@kruso.nl
The most sustainable website in the Netherlands based on 8 smart choices
67% less CO2 per pageload
Wanicare Foundation and Kruso have joined forces and have taken on the challenge to make the new website for Wanicare the most sustainable website in the Netherlands. From website hosting and loading animations, to color choice and even project management, we made every conscious decision we could about the planet. And as a result, the new wanicare.com emits 67% less CO2 per pageload than the old site.
An integrated approach to achieve our sustainable ambitions
Over the months that we've been working on this project, we came up with a number of simple but effective techniques to reduce the site’s environmental impact. By sharing them with you, we hope to inspire more people to think sustainably when thinking digitally:
Green energy: While more and more webhosting companies are running on 100% green energy, we went one step further by hosting wanicare.com with Leafcloud, where the waste heat from servers warms the buildings that they’re hosted in.
Close to the user: Just like physical transport, the further data must travel to reach its destination, the more emissions it causes. Leafcloud’s servers are hosted near the vast majority of Wanicare’s visitors, therefore ensuring that data “hops” through a minimum number of routes.
Modern image formats: Images encoded in modern formats, such as AVIF and WEBP, are a fraction the size of PNG and JPEG images. Every image on Wanicare’s site has been converted to the new formats.
Embracing loss: Wanicare’s WEBP images are at 95% quality. For a user, this is indistinguishable from a full-quality image, yet is up to 6x smaller – a quick win for sustainability with no negative effect for website visitors.
No video: displaying videos on websites causes a huge amount of data to be loaded. Not only does this cause more emissions than necessary, it also causes the site to load slower, which hurts the user experience. Therefore, we chose from the start to design a site based around images only.
Minimal JavaScript: Many sites use inefficient JavaScript to implement features that can be handled by native HTML or CSS, which causes unnecessary code to be loaded on every webpage. By taking full advantage of the features offered by the latest HTML and CSS specifications, we were able to implement a thoroughly modern look and feel with almost no JavaScript code.
Color choice: Even the colors used on a website can affect its emissions! On modern smartphone screens, darker colors take less energy to render than lighter ones. Therefore, our mobile site features more dark green than white, so that less energy is used to display the site on phones.
Online meetings: Although data transfer can cause emissions, it’s still a lot less than physical travel by car or even train. Therefore, all meetings about the development of the website take place online.
If you want to know how we tackle this, learn more about our digital sustainability approach. If you have questions or want to talk about how we did it in more detail, get in touch.
About Wanicare Foundation
Wanicare Foundation works in West Java, Indonesia, on the care of almost 500 wild animals, from the Cikananga Wildlife Center. These animals range from orangutans, crocodiles, bears to many bird species and leopards, and mainly come from illegal animal trade or have lost their habitat. Wanicare was founded in 2009 by Willemijn Eggen to rebuild the Cikananga Wildlife Center and to help with the mission to protect wild animals and nature. Today, a team of almost 30 people, including caregivers, veterinarians, and education workers, work in Cikananga every day to care for the animals, releases, and conservation projects, making it a leading center for conservation and education.
