First Public Working Draft: Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)

Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG)

https://www.w3.org/TR/2025/DNOTE-web-sustainability-guidelines-20251002/

Published by
 Sustainable Web Interest Group

Abstract

The Web Sustainability Guidelines (WSG) cover a wide range of recommendations to make web products and services more sustainable. These guidelines use planetary, people, and prosperity principles (the PPP approach) throughout the decision-making process, allowing users to minimize their environmental impact in various ways. These include user-centered design, performant web development, carbon-free infrastructure, sustainable business strategy, and, supported by measurability data, various combinations thereof. It should be noted that these guidelines will not address every possible mechanism or strategy to become more sustainable. These guidelines, which are notably web-focused, should be seen as the starting point of a sustainability journey that may ultimately cover other areas beyond the current scope, for example manufacturing or shipping of physical products. Following these guidelines will often make web content and services more accessible, usable, performant, and secure as a by-product. 

It is highly recommended that you take a methodical approach in applying these guidelines. Rather than working through the entire document and broadly attempting to apply everything to your digital project or service, scroll through the table of contents to find a guideline that appeals to your skill set or that you feel comfortable in attempting to apply. Sustainable change is measured in progress over perfection. By breaking down the specification into achievable goals based on clear guidelines or even success criteria, you can more easily make progress toward long-term sustainability targets. Guideline examples and resources may also provide implementation guidance, while diverse benefits can help justify the effort and commitment to management.

Status of the Document

This section describes the status of this document at the time of its publication. A list of current W3C publications and the latest revision of this technical report can be found in the W3C standards and drafts index. 

This document has been reviewed by Interest Group members and interested parties. This is a draft document which may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than a work in progress. The Interest Group's role in publishing is to draw attention to the specification and to promote its widespread deployment. 

By publishing these guidelines, the Interest Group does not expect that the work produced in this specification will affect the work undertaken by other W3C sustainability, accessibility, or performance groups. The Interest Group will continue to track these Working, Interest, and Community Groups as appropriate. 

To provide feedback regarding this specification, the preferred method is using GitHub. It is free to create a GitHub account to file issues. A list of issues filed as well as archives of previous mailing list public-sustainableweb@w3.org (archive) discussions are publicly available. There is currently no preliminary interoperability or implementation report, however one of the key tasks of this Interest Group is to examine the potential for better models for digital sustainability that can feed into tooling (and thus into large studies of implementations) that can be reported upon and fed back into guidance for the Web Sustainability Guidelines. 

This document was published by the Sustainable Web Interest Group as a Group Draft Note using the Note track.

Group Draft Notes are not endorsed by W3C nor its Members.

This is a draft document and may be updated, replaced, or obsoleted by other documents at any time. It is inappropriate to cite this document as other than a work in progress.

The W3C Patent Policy does not carry any licensing requirements or commitments on this document.

This document is governed by the 18 August 2025 W3C Process Document. Full document Next pageIntroduction

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Received on Thursday, 2 October 2025 09:38:29 UTC