We partnered with Pala Eyewear, a fellow B Corp based out of Brighton, to produce a new lightweight and low-carbon website for their e-commerce sales.
Pala began life in 2016, founded on the ambition to produce high-quality, long-lasting eyewear to fund eyecare programmes in Zambia, Ghana, Sierra Leone and Ethiopia. Many people underestimate the importance of glasses as a tool to fight poverty – it empowers the wearer by enabling them to read, learn and work. Using a ‘buy to donate’ model, the company continues to fund eye-care projects across Africa.
Showcasing Pala’s sunglasses, the website focuses on low-carbon design, with a stripped-back aesthetic that allows the sunglasses to stand out, and a layout that is based on UX best practices.
Our low-carbon, sustainable approach
We worked closely with John Pritchard, the founder of Pala, to push the eco-credentials of the website. We used our low-carbon design and build methods for WordPress to guide our processes throughout the project. We used techniques such as reusable content blocks, a minimalist design aesthetic, reduced JavaScript, and lazy-loaded modern image formats like WebP to help reduce page weights. Conditionally loading specific content only when necessary further reduced the weight of certain key pages.
Green hosting and renewable energy
The website is hosted on our 100% renewable-powered hosting. Being based in the UK, where the majority of the traffic for the website is from, is also helping to reduce the physical distance that data has to travel from the server to the end user. For international audiences, which is something Pala wanted to increase, we decided to run the website through the Cloudflare CDN (content delivery network) to improve performance for a global audience.
View the website
Making content upload less energy-intensive
We built a suite of page layout blocks with a custom WordPress backend. This makes it easier for the Pala team to add content to the site. It reduces admin time and energy used on Pala’s devices, adding even more to the eco-credentials. We did all of this while offering a functional, user-focused e-commerce website built with WooCommerce.
View the website
The website's homepage was producing around 2.8 grams of C02 per page view. It now produces only 0.63 grams per page view, vastly reducing the digital carbon footprint.
Nick Lewis
Senior Sustainable Web Developer
Our website was creaking when we reached out to Leap. We needed them to vastly improve the performance, design and overall UX to create a clean and slick experience for our customers, and that’s exactly what they did!
John Pritchard
Founder of Pala
The Impact
People
- New user-focused layout and streamlined shopping journey
- New easy-to-use content entry system and custom layout blocks
- Integration of ‘Virtual try on’ software
Planet
- Website carbon emissions reduced by 126%
- Website homepage weight reduced from 3.3MB to 860KB
Profit
With a new, easier-to-use website, Pala has been able to launch a new sight-saving funding project, providing the finance to refurbish and equip a new vision centre in the Northern District of Sierra Leone.
