How it Works

Thank you for using Ecograder. Below are details on how Ecograder works.

Your website uses energy with every interaction. Whether it's users navigating content, web hosts storing and serving pages, or network infrastructure transporting data, each component of the system requires electricity to operate. This impacts all three emissions scopes under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol.

Unfortunately, most of the web's energy still comes from fossil fuels. This contributes to the internet representing about 3% to 5% of total global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions each year.

How software is designed, developed, and maintained plays a critical role in web sustainability. Plus, choices made throughout a product or service's life cycle impact user experience, marketing metrics, costs, accessibility, and many other aspects crucial for high-impact, low-carbon success.

Ecograder can help you better understand, track, manage, and improve these elements over time.

How Ecograder Scores Webpages

Ecograder organizes metrics into four categories:

  1. Weight: The amount of data required to load and display pages
  2. Performance: How users interact with page features and content
  3. Hosting: Use of renewable energy sources when storing and serving data
  4. Other Considerations: Additional things to consider that affect the user experience, but are difficult to measure in terms of sustainability and do not impact your overall Ecograder score

When Ecograder crawls a page or range of pages, crawl data is organized and presented in these categories. To do this, Ecograder utilizes several open source and custom-created scripts. These third-party services include:

Data from these services is combined with custom scripts to identify tasks that will improve website performance in the four categories listed above.

The Green Web Foundation (TGWF) is a nonprofit organization working toward a fossil-free internet by 2030. CO2.js from The Green Web Foundation is a JavaScript module designed to estimate website emissions. The specific methodology CO2.js uses is outlined in Estimating Digital Emissions on the Sustainable Web Design site. Ecograder displays estimates for an internet ecosystem that includes the following segments:

  • End user devices
  • Network use
  • Site hosting
  • Embodied and operational emissions estimates

Google Lighthouse is an open-source, automated tool for improving the quality of web pages. Ecograder uses metrics identified by Google Lighthouse, but with a modified scoring algorithm.

Implementing Ecograder's Recommendations

Ecograder reports are designed to prioritize specific actions you can take to improve performance and reduce website carbon emissions throughout the system. Each report allows you to drill down into primary page components with specific guidance on minifying scripts, optimizing or resizing images, and so on.

Where relevant, Ecograder also links out to additional resources for a deeper understanding of specific topics, including the Web Sustainability Guidelines created by the Sustainable Web Interest Group.

As you make improvements, Ecograder will track changes each time you schedule a crawl. This helps you benchmark performance over time.

Thanks for using Ecograder

Mightybytes released the first version of Ecograder on Earth Day 2013. Since then, numerous updates have been made and Ecograder has crawled tens of millions of URLs. We're very grateful to all those who have contributed and provided valuable feedback to help us improve the product. Our goal has always been to help those who use Ecograder understand web sustainability and use it to improve their digital products and services.