Sustainability
The Wagtail team recognises the impact of software and ICT in the world’s carbon footprint. We are committed to reducing the climate impact of Wagtail itself and all other aspects of our project and community, in line with UN Sustainable Development Goals.
Sustainability standards
Here are specific standards we use to assess Wagtail:
- ITU L.1420, L.1430
- GHG Protocol Product Life Cycle Accounting and Reporting Standard – Corporate Value Chain (Scope 3), and its additional ICT Sector Guidance.
What we do
Wagtail CMS
Here are our current in-progress initiatives:
- Sustainability roadmap
- Documenting sustainability considerations in the CMS
- Measuring the carbon footprint of Wagtail
- Google Summer of Code internships to reduce Wagtail’s climate impact
Additionally, we regularly test Wagtail with a combination of automated and semi-automated performance testing tools.
Sites built with Wagtail
We strive to measure and optimise the carbon footprint of Wagtail sites, to reduce their impact.
As of 2023, Wagtail powers on the order of 0.1% of websites – but there are very high-profile, high-traffic websites using Wagtail. For example, the NHS websites receives more than 1 billion visits per year.
In the future, we will document common sustainability considerations to help Wagtail implementers create low-impact sites. This will cover all aspects of creating a website: content, design, front-end, back-end, hosting.
Sustainability goals beyond the CMS
Apart from Wagtail itself,
- We aim to make wagtail.org docs.wagtail.org, and guide.wagtail.org as low-impact as possible.
- We review environmental and equality considerations as part of organising Wagtail Space and other community events.
Our current footprint
As of May 2023, we estimate Wagtail websites’ footprint at:
- 8240.69 tons of CO2e/year for 4349 Wagtail sites
- 1.9 tCO2e/year average emissions per site
- 1.9 MB median page weight
How you can contribute
We’d love to get feedback on the sustainability of Wagtail. Get in touch with us in #sustainability on the Wagtail Slack if you are testing Wagtail and want to report your findings, or have a look at our backlog of issues and improvements.