What if every decision in your Drupal project—from design to deployment—could measurably reduce its environmental impact?

Prerequisite

To get the most out of the session, participants are advised to have a basic understanding of Drupal (site building or development) and general web performance concepts such as caching and frontend optimisation. No prior knowledge of sustainability frameworks is required.

Target Audience

This is particularly relevant for: Drupal developers (frontend and backend), Site builders and technical architects, DevOps engineers and platform teams and Digital teams working on public sector or large-scale Drupal platforms

Outline

Digital sustainability is becoming a key responsibility for organisations building and operating web platforms. The environmental impact of websites—through infrastructure usage, inefficient code, and heavy interfaces—directly affects the long-term health of the open web, particularly for public sector and large-scale platforms.
The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) provide a comprehensive framework, but applying them in real Drupal projects is not always straightforward. Rather than focusing only on performance optimisation, this session positions sustainability as a continuous concern across the entire project lifecycle.
This session presents a practical, step-by-step approach to integrating WSG into Drupal 10/11 projects: from design and development to deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
We will explore how sustainability can be embedded into everyday decisions, including Drupal-specific aspects such as cache strategy, asset libraries, and frontend architecture:
Design: reducing complexity and optimising media
Development & deployment: efficient configuration and caching
Monitoring: measuring performance and impact
Refactoring: prioritising improvements over time
Examples from real Drupal projects will be shared, showing how optimising assets and cache efficiency reduced page weight, lowered estimated carbon emissions, and improved performance.
Participants will leave with a repeatable framework to make sustainability an integral part of Drupal delivery.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:
- Understand the purpose and structure of the Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)
- Map sustainability principles to each phase of a Drupal 10/11 project lifecycle
- Apply practical techniques to improve efficiency during design and development
- Use tools to monitor performance and environmental impact
- Identify opportunities for continuous improvement and refactoring
- Integrate sustainability into team workflows and delivery processes

Experience level
Intermediate