Would love some feedback on EcoGrader, a new tool for measuring website sustainability.

Greetings fellow group members,

Last week my company Mightybytes launched the first version of EcoGrader, a free tool that helps people better understand website sustainability. Inspired by a need for more sustainable web solutions as well as Hubspot’s Marketing Grader, EcoGrader analyzes a website’s contents (HTML, CSS, Javascript, images and hosting information) and runs a series of tests to compile a score. Our hope is that this score and the report generated by EcoGrader will help people make more sustainable choices for their websites.

There are currently six tests that help determine a site’s cumulative score, but we plan to add more over time. The six existing tests are:

• Is your site hosted on a green/sustainable hosting provider?
• What is your website’s findability according to MozRank?
• How many HTTP requests are there upon hitting your website’s homepage?
• What is your Google Page Speed according to Google Page Speed Insights?
• Is your site designed mobile first or responsively according to [method of test]?
• Did you avoid using Flash on your site?

We included these tests based on categories mentioned in some of the articles found in this group’s Resources page: performance, usability, findability, and green ingredients, which for EcoGrader means use of a green hosting provider. Each of these items produces a single score from 1-10 that is then weighted to help produce the final output score. More info about how we built EcoGrader, what we test for, and other details can be found on the app’s FAQ page.

In the future, we plan to add more diagnostics that will test sites for use of CDNs, script minification, and so on, but for this first version we wanted to finish a minimum viable product that we could get feedback on to better validate the product roadmap.

We would love to hear any suggestions group members might have on bugs, tweaks, and how to improve EcoGrader moving forward. Our early research showed that the majority of people we spoke to (website decision makers, business owners, web designers, marketers, and nonprofits) still think the Internet is a ‘green’ medium, despite a lot of data that shows otherwise. It is our hope that EcoGrader will help dispel this myth.

There’s still a long way to go, but we feel this is a good start. I’d love to hear what you think. Thanks in advance for checking EcoGrader out.

Tim Frick

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