If you’re here to buy wine for the Holiday Season, we’d like you to take a second to admire the website…
OK, so you’re probably thinking it looks like a lot of other websites (except with great people and great wine). If you can’t see anything special about it, don’t worry—you’re not supposed to. This website has been created to look like a normal winery website, even though it’s completely revolutionary.
It’s the world’s first winery website built with digital sustainability at its core.
As any Brooks fan will know, sustainability has long been at the heart of everything we do, so when it came time to revamp our site in early 2022, the team at 5forests asked if we wanted to trial their Earth First Ecommerce® protocol to create a new type of website: one that isn’t terrible for the planet.
The internet can be terrible for the planet? This was all news to us.
We started researching and soon learned that if the internet were a country, it would be the 6th largest consumer of energy in the world! Digital technologies are currently responsible for 4% of all greenhouse gas emissions and that figure is expected to double by 2025. Although most people don’t realize it, websites can chew up vast amounts of fossil fuel-derived energy, and ecommerce websites are often the worst offenders.
The answer to this is called “sustainable web design”, which focuses on building websites that use minimal resources without sacrificing your customer experience. With the Earth First Ecommerce® protocol applied to our site, this means using fewer images and media, reducing file sizes of those images and other assets, taking advantage of improved technologies like modern image formats with globally deployed caching, and utilizing efficient development practices. By doing these things, Brooks has been able to significantly reduce the amount of energy needed to power our website, as well as improve the ease of use for you, our customers.
A better digital home base
We also discovered that not all website hosts are created equal. Along with changing how the site was built, we also switched to a website host that is powered entirely by renewable energy.
Unfortunately, we can’t control everything. Websites are going to consume energy. But we are now able to monitor the carbon footprint of the Brooks website, which allows us to offset the energy costs of selling wine online.
It all comes back to our ethos, to make an impact in everything we do.
Except on the web. This site has no impact at all—which is what makes it so revolutionary.