2.23 Reduce the Impact of Downloadable or Physical Documents

Printing or downloading documents can both be a net benefit and a net cost in terms of sustainability as it can reduce repeat requests to websites, but the act of printing (especially when unoptimized) wastes valuable ink and paper.

Criteria

Printing Documents: If the production of paper documents is essential, it should be designed to limit its impact to the lowest possible. Create a CSS Print stylesheet and test it with different types of content. Ensure PDF printing is encouraged over paper-based storage.
Optimize Documents: Provide all downloadable documents in a state of being optimized, compressed, and in a variety of accessible file formats.
Optimize Delivery: If a document is likely to be re-used, generate the document once on the server-side (preferably on a cookie-free domain) rather than forcing the effort to be duplicated.
Labels And Choice: Clearly display the document name, a summary, the file size, and the format, allowing the visitor a choice if possible of both the format, and the language (if not the same as the web page). Furthermore, be sure to avoid embedding the document within Web pages (provide a direct link to download or view within the browser instead).

Impact

Medium

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
Reducing the need to print documents or providing a printing StyleSheet will remove the emissions from wasted paper and ink.
Accessibility:
Providing a range of inclusively designed downloadable documents in a variety of formats which the visitor can choose between can benefit those with accessibility needs as they can choose the best fitting download for their device.
Performance:
Compressing or otherwise optimizing documents will allow them to be downloaded faster by the consumer, which helps visitors avoid having to wait to view uniquely formatted offline files.

GRI

materials: Medium
energy: Low
water: Medium
emissions: Low

Example

Embeddable Print CSS Stylesheet Library.

Resources

View the Guideline