3.10 Provide Code-Based Way-Finding Mechanisms

Helping visitors avoid wasting their time can reduce the number of emissions from time spent in front of a screen. As such, by using existing technologies like metadata, robots files, and accessibility-friendly aids within the page, improvements to the experience can be made.

Criteria

Metadata And Microdata: Metadata and microdata for search engines and social media have been optimized.
Search Engines: Search engines are not obstructed, while ill-intentioned robots and scripts are blocked.
Accessibility Aids: Accessibility and usability aids are provided to find content, such as skip links and signposts.

Impact

Low

Effort

Low

Benefits

Environmental:
People spend a lot of time searching for the information they want, and helping them get there quicker will reduce the drain on their device battery.
Social Equity:
Paradoxically as it may seem, the concept of getting people to spend more time on your website is not often beneficial. Visitors often want to accomplish a task and move on, yet we put great effort into keeping them on-site (time-wasting). This is a dark pattern that has consequences for sustainability (consumption of resources) and potentially the visitor’s health and well-being.
Accessibility:
Skip links and other aids can accelerate a visitor’s journey through your website, reducing the system resources their tooling requires, and assist them in finding the content they need.
Performance:
Finding information quickly is a perceived performance. It may not physically reduce the data transferred, but it will help reduce the steps required to achieve a goal; thus, the time on-screen is lessened.
Economic:
Quick visits may encourage repeat custom when the visitor has limited spare time.
Conversion:
A well-mapped website will index properly in search engines, leading to a good page rank.

GRI

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

Example

Code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
	<url>
		<loc>https://www.example.com/foo.html</loc>
		<lastmod>2022-06-04</lastmod>
	</url>
</urlset>

Build and submit a sitemap.

Resources

View the Guideline