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:

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,

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.