Climate Group

The Client

Climate Group is an international non-profit organization. Its mission is to accelerate climate action, the end goal being a world of net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, with greater prosperity for all. The organization works across business and government sectors to bring change to international markets and policies.

The Situation

Climate Group had been operating three separate websites and wanted to improve their user engagement and improve cross-pollination across their programs. However, they were concerned that increased site traffic and conversions would tax their site’s ability to perform without site crashes or downtime. They needed a solution that would simultaneously streamline code and empower their editorial team. 

The Challenge

In addition to bringing together their three sites under one brand identity, Climate Group also wanted to serve their multi-national audience more effectively, but poor load times for regions outside the U.S. negatively affected engagement, disappointing site visitors. Climate Group was concerned that as the site grew, so too would its issues. 

As an organization focused on driving climate action, Climate Group also wanted to be conscious of limiting their environmental impact. Previously, their RE100 site accounted for nearly three-quarters of their total emissions. With the knowledge that the digital industry is responsible for at least 1.4% of global emissions, Climate Group was committed to changing their digital footprint. 

The Solution

Climate Group partnered with creative technology agency manifesto and the teams ultimately selected Acquia Cloud Platform because it addressed so many of the organization’s challenges: guaranteed uptime, scalability, a geographically distributed content delivery network (CDN) that would help reduce the digital footprint while effectively serving international traffic and Acquia’s unrivaled support. 

manifesto adopted a strict pattern library approach that kept the code base streamlined. They also kept emissions down by introducing file-type requirements and optimization rules around images and icons, replacing auto-playing videos with static images — only expending energy if users clicked to play a video — stripping down third-party plug-ins and even dimming the website’s overall color scheme. 

Ultimately, manifesto combined the Climate Group’s two Drupal 7 sites and one other site built with a bespoke CMS into one Drupal 9 multisite instance on Acquia Cloud Platform. This gave the Climate Group the functionality necessary to build, operate and scale with ease — and all at a lower long-term cost of ownership than if the Climate Group had taken a DIY approach.

The Results 

Since consolidating the separate websites into one Drupal 9 multisite instance on Acquia Cloud Platform, the Climate Group has seen the following results: 

• Average page weight was reduced 55%
• Visitors spent 40% more time on the website during each session
• Visitors are also returning more frequently, up to 22% from 16%, suggesting site navigation is clearer 
• Average page load time is 50% less, increasing the site’s SEO and security rankings
• Site emissions dropped 60%, meaning more than 200 of the UK’s trees can focus on emissions elsewhere for the next year