For the past year I have been part of a UX task force developing the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines. As the guidelines reach the milestone of Draft Note status, I reflect on what they stand to achieve, and share insights from our process to make these guidelines as useful and usable as possible.

Increasingly, websites are being recognised as a contributor to global greenhouse gas emissions, with a range of metrics comparing website usage to environmentally impactful activities like driving cars, flying and powering electrical appliances. As part of the University’s pledge to reduce carbon emissions and become net zero by 2040, and aligned with an ongoing drive to encourage good digital and content housekeeping across our websites, LTW teams have been working on digital sustainability since 2024.

In the absence of appropriate defined standards and criteria to benchmark the environmental impact of web-based products and services, our approaches to digital sustainability have been experimental and data-driven. We have emphasised ‘learning by doing’, making use of freely-available resources and guidance to simultaneously understand concepts in this important area while seeking to apply them in University contexts.

Read about the University’s climate strategy on our website

Read our team’s blog posts about digital sustainability

These new W3C guidelines recognise digital sustainability and define ways to achieve it

W3C or the World Wide Web Consortium is an international non-profit organisation which develops standards and guidelines to help ensure, as per the title of Tim Berners-Lee’s latest book, the world wide web ‘is for everyone’. Well-known and well-established W3C standards relate to use of programming languages (HTML and CSS), and to accessibility (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines – WCAG). The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) are one of the newest W3C standards, aimed at ensuring a sustainable future for the web through the implementation of recommended actions to web products and services.

I have been privileged to be part of a worldwide community of contributors working to shape these W3C guidelines, to ultimately produce web sustainability standards to govern and direct web practices towards building and running a more sustainable internet. In this blog post, I provide more detail about the WSG and share detail of the process to develop them.

The Web Sustainability Guidelines, published on w3.org

In a separate blog post, I surface the finer points of individual UX-focused guidelines and consider how they may achieve practical digital sustainability improvements:

From principles to practical W3C guidelines: Making digital sustainability happen through UX design

The WSG encourage considering the planet as well as people

Designed to be universally implementable to all web products and services, the Web Sustainability Guidelines are based on a set of three overarching principles: Planet, People and Prosperity (PPP).

Keeping these principles in mind prompts a well-known UX concept of balancing user needs (People) with business needs (Prosperity), but with the additional consideration of wider impacts of the web product or service, for example on non-users, sometimes called non-human users. An example of this applied in the context of an e-commerce site could be taking into account the planetary impact of transportation required for the delivery of the goods being sold to the site’s customers.

Building on the PPP approach, the guidelines also encourage actions to ensure web products and services meet six criteria outlined in the Sustainable Web Manifesto: Clean, Efficient, Open, Honest, Regenerative and Resilient.

Read the Abstract of the Web Sustainability Guidelines for more detail about their development

After various iterations, the WSG will be finalised in April 2026

Standards developed by the W3C understandably follow a rigorous process of editing, critique and assessment before final publication. As such, the WSG began several years ago and have been carefully edited and adapted over time. On 15 December the guidelines reached ‘Draft Note’ (finalised) status, having gone through a horizontal and wide review to gather insight from invited experts and other contributors across W3C. Looking forward, the goal is to submit them as a statement, at which point they reach web standard status and become a W3C specification, in time for Earth Day on 22 April 2026.

Read about the W3C Document Review process on w3.org

Each guideline follows a defined structure, aimed at ease of implementation

Recognising that successful implementation of a guideline is largely dependent on how it is written, when it came to defining a structure for the Web Sustainability Guidelines, a format mirroring WCAG was deemed most appropriate. Each guideline includes a clear statement of intent and associated success criteria, with a gathered set of resources to help with implementation. To recognise the contribution each guideline makes to the broader web sustainability goals, each guideline contains a collapsible ‘additional information’ section laying out detail on reporting and tags, acknowledging the relevant parts of the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), adopted as the standard reporting framework.

Read about the Global Reporting Initiative

Taking one guideline as an example illustrates this structure (at Draft Note status):

2.1. Examine and disclose any external factors interacting with your project

Identify, track, and publicly disclose negative external factors.

Success Criterion: Impact analysis

Anticipate and identify existing or potential negative external factors. Disclose these in a publicly available resource, identifying areas where digital sustainability can be improved. Perform this audit at the start of your project and at regular intervals.

Success Criterion: External impact

Establish a plan of action for affected parties who might be indirectly impacted by choices made with your project. Examples include neighbors accepting parcels or traffic jams due to deliveries. Other examples include the local health impacts of infrastructure emissions, or supply chain pressure.

Additional information

Reporting

GRI 301: Materials: Medium

GRI 302: Energy: Medium

GRI 303: Water: Medium

GRI 305: Emissions: Medium

Tags

Accessibility, Compatibility, Hardware, Ideation, Networking, Performance, Reporting, Research, Social Equity, Software

View guideline 2.1. Examine and disclose any external factors interacting with your project on w3.org

At Draft Note status there are 80 guidelines, arranged in four sections

After an introduction which lays out the background and structure of the WSG as well as information on their measurability and conformance and their association with other, related standards, and a section of supporting documents the guidelines themselves are presented in four sections: User Experience Design (containing 21 guidelines), Web Development (containing 20 guidelines), Hosting, Infrastructure and Systems (containing 12 guidelines) and Business Strategy and Product Management (containing 27 guidelines). The guidelines conclude with a list of considerations, a glossary, acknowledgements, a changelog and references.

View the Web Sustainability Guidelines in full on w3.org

I was part of a UX task force which worked on the User Experience Design WSG

To review and appraise the guidelines as was required by the W3C process, separate groups or task forces were assembled to tackle guidelines in each of the sections. Weekly meetings led by W3C staff tracked progress of the guidelines development in alignment with the planned schedule. In these meetings, there was time allocated for break-out spaces for each task force to work on guidelines in the respective sections as well as time for sharing and collaboration across the different task forces.

As part of the UX task force I was extremely fortunate to be able to work with and learn from a range of very knowledgeable UX and editorial experts worldwide. Over the months, we all became very familiar with the wording of the individual UX guidelines and brought our different perspectives to shaping them.

Discussions about each UX guideline were documented in individual Github issues

As a group of UX professionals, we were all used to alternating between a wider, zoomed-out view to a more granular, zoomed-in perspective. During our regular meetings, we began collaborating on an online whiteboard to give us oversight of all the UX guidelines, to help us appreciate their collective and complementary purposes. Gradually we progressed to discussing and finetuning the wording of individual guidelines in separate Github issues, following recognised W3C protocol.

The guidelines were ordered to match a typical design process

Thinking through how we would envisage the guidelines being implemented, it made sense to start with the guidelines encouraging research to obtain a holistic picture of user needs, business needs and planetary impacts before getting into the detail of specific design elements covered by other guidelines. As such, the guidelines begin as follows:

2.1. Examine and disclose any external factors interacting with your project

2.2. Understand user requirements or constraints, resolving barriers to access

2.3. Integrate sustainability into every stage of the ideation process

Guidelines covering practices to prepare interface elements and detailing choices about how to present them to users are ordered later, for example:

2.4. Minimize non-essential content, interactivity, or journeys

2.9. Use a design system for interface consistency

2.11. Optimize media for sustainability

Thinking about the need for continued evaluation and review of web products and services, guidelines emphasising auditing and testing bookend the set of UX guidelines. These include:

2.19. Audit and test for bugs or issues requiring resolution

2.20. Verify that real-world users can successfully use your work

2.21. Regularly test and maintain compatibility

In the task force, we thought carefully about how to describe specific technologies and processes

Taken together, the guidelines contain a mixture of broad, abstract advice as well as more detailed recommendations of specific practices and approaches. For the guidelines giving more prescriptive advice, it was important to be mindful of the rapidly evolving technical landscape and to avoid using terms and concepts that may be superseded or become irrelevant.

For example, guideline 2.11, about optimization of media, does not make specific mention of converting to specified formats such as WebP, WebM and so on, instead it considers the different processes and stages that occur when a piece of media is displayed on a web service or product, and advises ‘appropriate code minification, reducing rendering effort and media-specific progressive enhancement’ to account for a range of possible relevant approaches. Detail referring to specific formats is reserved for the resources accompanying the guideline.

In a similar fashion, guideline 2.7, which focuses on avoiding manipulative and deceptive design does not include specific mention of AI or GenAI. Given the emergent nature of these technologies the guideline intent says ‘Avoid using patterns, content, tools or techniques that may artificially manipulate or deceive the user and waste energy’. The resources section of the guideline is where articles can be found with more specific advice on ethical and honest use of different AI technologies.

We streamlined guidelines that overlapped with other web standards

As well as critiquing the guidelines within the web sustainability context, we also assessed them in relation to other W3C guidelines – notably WCAG. In this process we identified that certain WSG covered the same ground as WCAG, which highlighted the shared motivations and impact of responsible web practices. For example, one guideline included in an earlier Draft Note version stated: ‘Offer suitable alternatives for every format used’, and advocated for including accessible alternatives to formats like video and images (such as transcripts and alt text). Some members of the task force felt the advice in this guideline was adequately covered by WCAG, however, others felt it was justifiable to include it in the WSG, arguing that supplying alternate file formats supported digital sustainability by giving users a less environmentally impactful route to consume the web content. Together, we resolved to keep this advice in the WSG, as Guideline 2.14.

It’s hoped the WSG will be to sustainability what WCAG are to accessibility

The publication of the W3C Web Sustainability Guidelines addresses the need for a defined source of standards for digital sustainability, and therefore represents an important milestone in the global need to make the web more sustainable. It is anticipated that the WSGs will facilitate wide-spread adoption of digital sustainability practices in the same way that WCAG prompted action on accessibility, and if the WSG follow the same path as WCAG, it is hoped that they could be adopted and used as a legal benchmark, to ensure that digital sustainability practices are not optional but mandatory.

On a practical note, the WSG play an important role in ensuring that those who make web products and services not only know about digital sustainability, but can take actionable steps to ensure that the digital contribution to the climate emergency is minimalised and, in the process, help ensure digital sustainability practices become the norm, not the exception.

There’s now an opportunity to try out the WSG before they are finalised in April 2026

In their current Draft Note status, the guidelines are now in a format where they can be adopted and applied in different circumstances, to the build, creation and maintenance of a range of web-based products and services. As with any set of guidelines, the WSG are open to interpretation and there is a degree of ambiguity associated, and it is only through practical application that learning about the usefulness and usability can occur. I am looking forward to trying out the different WSG in the University context, to feedback learnings to the W3C community – in the process helping to ensure that each guideline strikes the right balance of being applicable and implementable.