Company: Etive Mor
Founder: Liam Laverty
Website: https://www.etive-mor.com/
About Etive Mor
Energy is consumed whenever we open a web page. The way each website is designed and run affects the energy and greenhouse gas emissions resulting from its operation. Edinburgh web development company, Etive Mòr launched in 2023 to provide application programming interfaces (APIs) that help businesses to measure the CO2 equivalent emissions associated with the operation of their websites. Founder, Liam Laverty comments, “The best way to reduce CO2 emissions is not to produce them in the first place, Umbraco’s new APIs have allowed us to stop doing that.”
In June 2024, the start-up won the Umbraco Sustainability Challenge: established to share carbon-conscious web design practices that measurably reduce the carbon footprint of sites built on the Umbraco CMS platform.
Etive Mòr won by applying the Umbraco Content Delivery API, the uSync package, and Next.js Static Site Generation (SSG), which pre-builds front-end pages and deploys them via an Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN), rather than using an energy-intensive web server which compiles HTML pages every time a visitor lands on a site.
The Sustainability Best Practices published by the Umbraco community Sustainability Team, recommends setting a web page limit of 1Mbyte. By using standard fonts and few colours and images, Etive Mòr shrank its web page weight from 800Kb to 188.6Kb, reducing its Scope 1 emissions by 75%.
Switching off the production server for 90% of the day reduced the site’s Scope 2 emissions.
Scope 3 emissions were reduced by taking a DevOps approach that decreased Github server compute time from 25 hours to 3.5 hours a month.
Etive Mòr’s application architecture redesign reduced its energy consumption on the Umbraco server by more than 90%.
Instead of the traditional method of HTML page content being compiled when visitors land on a site, which requires a server to sit waiting for requests, Static Site Generation creates front-end websites during the site build and serves content via the Azure CDN, only sending a request to the Umbraco backoffice, via the Next.js app, when stale content needs to be updated. Laverty writes, “This means that we’re able to turn off our Umbraco server for more than 23 hours a day. Because of this, we achieve a 95% reduction in CO2e from our Umbraco backoffice application’s Scope 2 emissions.”
“A comparable always-on instance would cost over £200 a month, Our projected Azure website spend is below £40.”
Etive Mòr’s build servers are located in Scotland and mostly powered by renewable energy, or low-carbon sources. When this is not possible, the company tries to run the build servers at the least-carbon-intense time of day from a datacentre with a low-carbon energy mix. The company also self-hosts Github Action runners in its Edinburgh office to ensure that its DevOps pipelines are run and powered in Scotland.
The old site produced between 0.24g and 0.25g CO2e when tested using WebsiteCarbon.com and Ecograder. The first page view of the new Etive Mòr website, built on Umbraco Cloud using the carbon-conscious architecture, produces between 0.03g to 0.06g CO2e.
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