A website is designed through various user pathways, for fulfilling different functional units :
Ordering and buying an object;
Booking a train ticket;
Consulting information;
All those functional units imply that different web pages have to be loaded on the user terminal, queries and data must be transferred and updated along the user pathway, new data need to be stored, etc.
To estimate the impact of a website, Greenly's methodology consists in analyzing the impact of the main user clickpaths :
Definition of the click path, from start to end of the service unit
Estimation of the digital resources consumed by each webpage of the click path: webpage size, query volume... Greenly uses some tools and web plugins to analyze webpages' technical content
Conversion of the digital resources amounts consumed into carbon emissions (thanks to Greenly's carbon expertise)
What data do we need from you :
Define the most important click paths of your website
Don't try to be exhaustive on this, we advise that you select only the user click paths that represent between 70% to 90% of your total web traffic
Define the functional unit of each click path :
Examples: "to book a train ticket", "to buy a reduction card to be synchronized on my personal web account", "to consult 3 times a day a specific article on my bank mobile application"...
Wording: an action verb that serves a specific objective
Include a specific/technical criterium
To be associated with a last or frequency if it is not an unitary action
Unchanging: the functional unit should be able to be "replayed" X weeks/months/years later
Each click path description must explicit all webpages that the user must go through, and which button/feature is used on each one of them by the user to go to the next one
step 1 : to look for a train ticket, with specific criteria
step 2 : to consult the results page
step 3 : to select a result
step 4 : ...
If possible, provide for each click path the associated web traffic. The time period to consider will depend on the time period of your carbon assessment, which is most of the time a yearly study.
Note that Greenly's team will have to get access to your website in order to carry out the analysis. Then, make sure there won't be any user access or security hindrance to the process.