Umbraco is highly commended in Sustainability in Tech Awards 2024

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open-source web content management system (CMS) company, Umbraco, has been highly commended in the ‘Best Value Chain Initiative’ category of the Sustainability in Tech Awards 2024.

Umbraco was nominated for its work with its digital agency partners and the open-source community to promote carbon-conscious web design practices.

Winners were announced at the inaugural CRN Sustainability in Tech Summit at BAFTA, London, at which speakers from the IT channel shared practical advice and strategies that organisations can apply to reduce their carbon emissions.

As the largest open-source .Net CMS provider in the world, Umbraco has recognised that it has an opportunity and a responsibility to share best practices for sustainable web design with its highly-engaged open-source community and its thriving network of 1,500 digital agency partners.

In a CMS industry first, Umbraco established a Sustainability Team in March 2023. It is actively working with its digital agency partners to influence changes in web design that will measurably reduce the environmental impact of websites and digital services built on the Umbraco platform.

The Umbraco Sustainability team includes technical and business leaders from six digital agencies, supported by two Umbraco HQ employees. UK digital agencies on the team include platinum partners: Tangent, Nexer Digital, CTI Digital, and Great State; gold partner, TPX Impact; and Dutch digital agency, Perplex Digital. The team has published best practices for infrastructure, backend and frontend developers and content editors, to empower them to build more sustainable websites and digital services.

Commenting on the award, Lasse Fredslund, Umbraco CMS product owner, said, “A million websites have been built on Umbraco’s CMS over the past twenty years. Each website refresh presents web designers with an opportunity to make multiple micro-optimisations that reduce the energy consumed and greenhouse gases emitted by datacentre servers, data transfers and end-user devices that display web pages.”

We are absolutely delighted to share this commendation with our talented digital agency partners who have stepped up and joined the Umbraco Sustainability Team. They have shown their unwavering commitment to sharing best practices with other members of the Umbraco community, so that they can also begin to make websites more sustainable.”

As well as adapting their own practices, Umbraco and its partners have re-evaluated their suppliers to identify whether they can make more sustainable choices.

Acknowledging the environmental impact of digital service expansion, Umbraco foresees sustainable web design practices becoming more commonplace, as the major cloud service providers upgrade their own technologies and work towards net zero.

Commenting on the business benefits of adopting sustainable web design practices, Umbraco CEO, Kim Sneum-Madsen said, “In the past year we’ve seen more companies asking our digital agency partners to support their efforts to reduce environmental impact when designing new digital experiences. This has spurred the development of carbon-conscious web design practices. By sharing their best practices with the wider community, these pioneers will help to make sustainable digital design much more widespread.”