Getting Started with Sustainability

The Drupal community understands it has a responsibility to both people and the planet. Our Sustainability Statement includes both our code and our community. This is both an overview of what has been done to reduce the environmental footprint of running Drupal. 

The Drupal community is always working to improve our code. A small team of volunteers is working to help Drupal Core and Drupal CMS follow the best practices described in the W3C’s Draft Web Sustainability Guidelines. If you are interested, please join the #sustainability-team Slack channel.

Digital sustainability covers a range of disciplines, and getting involved here can help with server and client performance, web accessibility and user experience. Drupal is driven by volunteers, and the only way it will be environmentally responsible is if we make it that way. There is a list of outstanding sustainability issues that need work.

Performance Improvements

Performance is one of Drupal’s Core Gates. There is always more that can be done on performance, and Drupal is working to minimize resource uses both in the data center and on the browser. There is a list of outstanding performance issues that need more performance-oriented developers. 

For detailed server profiling, Tag1’s Gander project provides insights on ways to improve performance. Tools like New Relic also can offer insights about places where some servers may be facing bottlenecks. 

A lot of work has been done to optimize Drupal’s front-end as well. This Smashing Magazine post outlines how this can be taken further when developing your site. Worth checking out, Drupal CO2 — a complete Drupal self-help guide to reducing your website's carbon footprint and impact on the environment,  by Salsa Digital.

Image Handling

Drupal has included a very powerful image management tool in core. By default when people upload images in Drupal Core, image styles in Core install profiles resize the images and convert to Webp. 

There are existing issues to support AVIF and also ensure that a highly compressed image format is included by default in new image styles. 

Drupal’s image formatter uses native lazy loading by default. It is also configurable so you can avoid lazy loading for above the fold images. Core also supports supports using srcset and the picture element. There is an issue to make  srcset and picture easier in Core. 

Accessibility

Accessibility is another Drupal Core Gate. Having clean, semantic code, helps ensure that you have good code quality that is faster to execute. Browsers are built to have a high fault tolerance to bad code, but it always allows for the possibility of error. 

Furthermore, statistics suggest that one in four people has a disability, and this is a big portion of any audience. Making sites easier to use allows them to quickly accomplish their tasks and move on. Drupal is one of the more accessible CMS out there, but there are still lots of known and open accessibility issues. There is also a #accessibility Slack channel where you can post questions. 

Presentations and Webinar

• Sustainable by Design - The revolutionary shift to sustainable web practices 
• ICT Greenhouse Gas Emissions Are Exploding – How Drupal Community Should Engage and Contribute 
• CLIENTS & INDUSTRY - Our joint sustainability journey: reducing emissions and technical learnings
• Talking Drupal #424 - Web Sustainability Guidelines
• The Sustainable Web: Exploring Drupal’s Sustainability Project, and How You Can Help. - Tag1TeamTalk