Cultural websites carbon footprint study

At Supercool we care about the environment, and the impact the websites we build have on our planet.

We already know that every web page has a carbon footprint. And that arts and cultural organisations – and your audiences – care about sustainability.

But there’s currently no benchmark to assess the carbon footprint of cultural websites. This makes it hard to know how we can reduce our negative impact. Knowing what to tackle – and what to tackle first – can be a challenge.

Whilst a tool like Website Carbon calculator compares individual web pages with other pages across the internet, it doesn’t take into account the number of times those pages are visited. But every visit to that page adds to its overall carbon footprint.

Plus, we know that web pages in the cultural sector will tend towards be more energy-intensive than average because you have so much rich content – like images and video – to share.

Our new benchmarking study and subsequent report aim to help cultural organisations understand what “good” looks like in terms of their website.

New benchmarking study and report

In collaboration with our friends at Digital Carbon Online we’ll be tracking the carbon footprints of 65 websites in the UK arts, cultural and heritage sector. We’ll then use that data to publish a website carbon footprint benchmarking report.

In collaboration with Digital Carbon Online we'll:

• Assess real-time carbon emissions from key pages on websites

• Provide comprehensive benchmarking across 65 websites

• Identify common patterns

• Suggest opportunities for improvements

We’ll be gathering data from early February until the end of April. Following the 3-month tracking period, we’ll publish a report that will be freely available to the cultural sector.

Throughout 2025 we’ll be sharing our learnings from the report, along with resources and tools to help you compare your organisation's website – and reduce its carbon footprint.

Take part in future studies:

We already have our first cohort of participating organisations (thanks, everyone!) but we’re hoping to run the study again. Next time, with a larger group!

Interested in taking part in future studies? Please complete this Expression of Interest.

Helpful digital sustainability resources:

• Sign-up to Digital Carbon Online’s FREE email masterclass
  
• Supercool + Sustainability – our resource hub of FREE articles, tools, webinars and more.