In our push for engaging digital experiences, we often focus on the look and feel of websites, with a lot of attention on features. But performance and sustainability deserve just as much focus. They're closely linked, a sustainable website is likely to be highly performant. There are ways of measuring both, and understanding their impact can help improve not only user experience but also the planet. 🌍
That's why I'm excited to announce the launch of a new community package XperienceCommunity.Sustainability. 📦
Inspired by the Umbraco Community
This project wouldn't exist without the incredible work of the Umbraco Community Sustainability team and their contributions to the Umbraco.Community.Sustainability package. 🍃
The team have been doing brilliant work to advocate for more environmentally responsible web practices within the Umbraco world. Their mission is to reduce carbon emissions related to Umbraco by driving awareness and promoting conscious, sustainable use and development.
Their vision? Leading the way to more sustainable CMS platforms.
What better example of that leadership than seeing their impact spread into other ecosystems? 🤔
This is where XperienceCommunity.Sustainability enters, a reflection of that vision, by bringing their ideas, values, and tooling into the Kentico world and continuing that mission across the two platforms.
Simply put, the package allows content editors and marketers to see the environmental impact of their choices. Have they uploaded large images, videos, and other assets? Are they using slow third-party scripts? The package calculates the total page weight and uses CO2.js to convert these values into carbon emission estimations. Then giving the user an easy to understand overall rating (A+ through to F).
My vision was simple: replicate their success, tailor the experience to Xperience's architecture, and contribute improvements back where possible. While building the new package, I resolved a couple issues around the audit process, mainly with the usage of Playwright. It's been great to see these fixes have already been brought into the Umbraco version by Rick Butterfield. They're now included in v1.0.8 and v3.0.3, which is a really rewarding example of ideas and improvements flowing between the platforms. 🎉
Launch Features
The initial release includes the page content audit, allowing content editors and marketers to see a per page sustainability report.
In the future, I plan on implementing a central sustainability dashboard similar to the sustainability section in Umbraco. I'm also looking forward to adding graphs, charts, etc. to show progress made on an individual page and across the entire channel.
Open Source and the Cross-Platform Wins
This is what open source is all about. I may be building something tailored to Xperience by Kentico, but through collaboration and shared goals, we're all pushing towards their goal of more sustainable CMS platforms.
If you’re working with Xperience by Kentico and want to make your site a little greener, I’d love for you to try the package, share feedback, and contribute ideas.