Our commitment to sustainable design
We built this site on sustainable design principles—and that’s not just an empty promise. It’s a commitment. Our aim is to minimize the site’s environmental footprint while giving you the best possible experience.
What is sustainable website design?
A sustainably designed site is aware of its own environmental impact. It seeks to combine a minimal environmental footprint with an optimum user experience, and is fast and easy to use.
Our plan of action
We built sustainable design into this website from the drawing board, and we’re continuing to apply these principles as we improve it. Here are some of the practical steps we’ve taken.
1 – Reduce page size
We compress all logos, images and other graphic elements with WebP, a new compression format.
We’ve paid special attention to our homepage to make it as readable and as light as possible.
Our target for maximum page size is 3 MB.
2 – Offer links instead of hosting content
We prefer to offer content without duplicating or hosting it. For videos in particular, we’ve built the site so that it doesn’t carry their weight. Instead of loading with the page, videos load only when they’re launched, saving tens to hundreds of gigabytes of storage.
3 – Optimize navigation and the site’s most frequently viewed pages
Our 10 most frequently visited pages are always optimized, with a size limit that reduces bandwidth consumption. We want our most popular content to deliver the best possible user performance.
4 – Test the site in 3G
By testing the pages with a 3G connection, we can be sure that groupe-sncf.com is accessible on a mobile device from anywhere, including areas where 4G and 5G aren’t available.
The site is tested each month, at end of every sprint.
5 – Reduce document size
Legal and other documents are compressed, and never exceed 25 megabytes. Though most are much lighter, some legal documents cannot be compressed any further. Everyone at SNCF Group is now aware of this new limitation. Multiplied by the number of downloads per year, these lighter files require significantly less storage and bandwidth relative to our previous site.
We’re also optimizing PDF files. Most are now limited to 10 megabytes, though a few exceptions may be as heavy as 50 megabytes.
6 – Optimize Drupal software
Our site uses Drupal CMS software and a dedicated front office. Experts worked to apply best practices for use of this software, reducing the number of calls to the server, using caching to limit consumption, setting up a system for regular database clean-ups, and more.
7 – Raise employee awareness
Everyone on the website’s project, development, UX and UI teams has been made aware of these new practices, and we’ve organized a wealth of dedicated technical training courses. All employees are also aware of how important it is to shrink the carbon footprint of their personal workspace—by eliminating email and large files, for example.
8 – Use sustainably designed brand guidelines
The brand guidelines for our Group site were designed with reduced consumption in mind. Features include plenty of white space, no gradients, and a dark mode option.
9 – Audit the site
Our in-house project team worked with the Group’s sustainable design team to apply best practices and win expert approval.
When our new site opened in May 2024, it was rated Silver.
Each month we’ll track the performance of our top 10 pages closely, working to improve our metrics with EcoIndex, an online rating service.
The Lighthouse calculator shows that, compared with our prior site (sncf.com), we’ve already improved by:
- 14% for accessibility
- 23% for best practices
- 9% for SEO
- 52% for performances (July 2024)
Performance is currently a little lower (63%), but will be the subject of particular attention in the coming months.
On average, compared with the previous reference site (sncf.com - October 2023), there has been a clear improvement on our panel of ten pages.
Performance: Old site vs new site
Our EcoIndex score rose
from E to C
up from 30.85 to 66.9 (top 10 pages, on average)
Requests per page fell
54%
from 93.7 to 43.8 (top 10 pages, on average)
Page size shrank
60%
from 6.9 to 2.63 MB (top 10 pages, on average)
10 - Data storage
In moving from our previous site (sncf.com) to present one (groupe-sncf.com), we downsized our databases and file archive radically, from an initial 214GB to just 5GB (July 2024). This represents less than 0.2kg of carbon consumption a year.
A 98% reduction athat generates savings of around 8kg of Co2 per year, equal to a 2,730 km journey by TGV high-speed rail3.
11 - Eco-design declaration (RGESN)
We are currently carrying out a self-diagnosis in accordance with RGESN4, the general reference framework for digital service eco-design.
Our provisional score is 80%. We will publish the final score and declaration after verification by an independent body.
Understanding corporate digital responsibility in 2 minutes