Sustainability – It doesn’t end at the vehicle

The motorsport industry, being largely built upon the use of fossil fuels, faced intense scrutiny and pressure to reduce their reliance on carbon as the issue of climate change grew.

Considering that was years ago, the terms sustainability and motorsport wouldn’t have even been uttered in the same sentence.

The action that the industry has taken regarding sustainability should be applauded.

With the release of Formula 1’s sustainability plan in November 2019, vowing to achieve a net-zero carbon footprint by 2030, and MotoGP’s plan to use 100% sustainable fuel in their motorcycles by 2027, the industry is taking a huge step in the right direction.

But when we’re looking at sustainability, digital sustainability is often overlooked.

What even is Digital Sustainability?

In essence, it is about designing, developing and using technology in a responsible way that reduces our digital footprint and as such, should definitely be factored into the sustainability plans for Motorsport teams and organisations alike.

So how can a motorsport website be made more sustainable?

Sustainable web design for your motorsport website

The internet produces approximately 3.7% of global carbon emissions, which is shockingly similar to the airline industry in terms of environmental impact.

So the importance of sustainable web design is more integral now than ever.

Whilst the obvious benefits of sustainable web design and efficient website management culminates in a reduction on the impact on the environment, it can also prove cost-effective for your organisation.

Here are some tips for sustainable web design.

Hosting Environment

Known as green servers, green hosting or eco-friendly hosting – Green Web hosting is an internet hosting that utilises energy-efficient technologies or strategies that reduce the environmental impact of their activities.

Whether powered by 100% renewable energy sources, investing in carbon sequestration technology or vowing to plant trees – these hosting environments theoretically produce zero CO2, this reducing your overall environmental impact.

Code efficiency / code minification

Minification is essentially the process of taking the site’s source code and making it more efficient. The aim is to reduce the size of a file by taking out any unnecessary code, without altering its functionality.

If you have smaller, more efficient source code file sizes, you should also have quicker loading speeds and less processing time required by a device which benefits your users and lowers the site’s environmental impact.

We’d strongly recommend adopting regular code reviews as best practice for your motorsport website irregardless as the digital world is ever-changing and regular code reviews allow you to stay as optimised as possible.

Content optimisation

This is inclusive of all of the content and assets that sit on your site. Whether that be images, video or text based content.

There are many methods that can reduce your digital carbon footprint, such as image optimisation, which reduces the image file size without compromising quality (we use Imagify for our WordPress websites), or embedded your website video via Youtube rather than streaming directly from your website as every YouTube video streamed has zero carbon footprint from Google data centres.

Fonts also play their part as they influence the overall weight of your webpage. System default fonts that are already on user’s devices can be used to save weighty website uploads. Or if you are using custom fonts, ensuring that these are optimised by sticking to high-compression font files or serving font files from the server is best practise.

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

Relevant and clear SEO such as meta titles and meta descriptions of your content pages results in users spending less time trawling SERPs browsing for information relevant to them.

Whilst this seems like a very thinly-veiled option for your motorsport website sustainability, less browsing time equates to a reduction in the energy that’s consumed, this creating a positive impact.

Working with sustainable partners

Whilst you may be ticking all the boxes from a sustainability point of view, are your providers doing the same?

If you’re utilising third-party tools on your motorsport website, such as event and ticketing partners, payment gateways etc – are these companies sustainable too?

Using third-party tools to compliment your sustainability pledge are the true embodiment of ‘practise what you preach’ and with enough of an uprising, may provide incentive for those companies who aren’t sustainable to ‘up their game’.

Our takeaways

Sustainability with Motorsport doesn’t just stop with the vehicle.

Changes can be made in all aspects to positively impact your carbon footprint, even in something as intangible as your motorsport website and if adopted by companies worldwide as part of their digital sustainability pledge, it will make a difference working towards a goal to offset some of the damage we have caused to our planet.

If you have any questions, or want to find out how your motorsport website can become more sustainable, get in touch on 01474 704400 or email [email protected]