ACCESS Network Website Optimisation

The ACCESS Network website was recently redesigned and optimised by James from the University of Exeter Multimedia Design Studio.

As the website grew over time, additional pages, images and content gradually increased the amount of data required to load each page.

This not only slowed the experience for visitors but also increased the overall digital footprint of the site. The project focused on improving performance, accessibility and environmental efficiency while simplifying the structure, improving navigation and significantly reducing the amount of data transferred when pages load.

Key Improvements

• A completely redesigned homepage with clearer structure and improved storytelling. The goal was to minimise clicks and show off our wonderful Network members
• A new mega-menu navigation system to help visitors find information more quickly
• Improved search functionality with clearer and more useful results
• A more logical site structure and sitemap to support navigation and search engines
• Streamlined content with fewer unnecessary or duplicated pages
• Extensive performance optimisation across the entire site
• Improved SEO foundations including metadata, structure and indexing
• Major accessibility improvements including improved colour contrast across the site, keyboard shortcuts and further unique options including colour blind filters, dyslexia font, line spacing and more.

Why Bandwidth Matters

Every time a visitor loads a webpage, data is transferred between the server and their device. This total amount of transferred data is known as bandwidth.

To put it simply: if a 20 MB PDF is downloaded by five people, that’s 100 MB of data used from that one file alone. Multiply that across hundreds of visitors browsing pages and downloading files every day, and the total adds up very quickly. That all costs energy.

Reducing bandwidth has two major benefits:

• Webpages load faster for visitors
• Less energy is required by servers, networks and devices

Before the redesign, the ACCESS Network website was transferring an average of 1.81 GB of data per day. In the first days following the relaunch, that figure has dropped to an average of approximately 277 MB per day — around 85% less data, or roughly one sixth of what the old site was using.

! These are early figures based on a small sample, and we’ll be back in a few months with a full month-on-month breakdown comparing the old and new sites. But even at this stage, we are extremely happy with the results.

Performance Results

The optimisation work resulted in significant improvements across multiple independent testing platforms.

Homepage Performance (our most popular page)

One of the most significant improvements can be seen on the website homepage.

Despite now containing significantly more content and being approximately three times longer to scroll, the new homepage is around nine times lighter than the previous version.

• *Dependent on what four news article feature images were loaded.
• ** Size varies depending on cached images (typically 24-120 KB).

Environmental Impact

Independent analysis tools estimate that the optimised website produces significantly lower emissions per page view than the previous version.

For context, 10,000 monthly visits now produce roughly 97.21 g of CO₂ emissions, which is roughly equivalent to:

• Driving ~0.17 miles in a Tesla Model S

Image & File Optimisation

Over several years of growth, the website had accumulated a vast library of images, each one contributing to page weight and slower load times. To address this, we now use a tool called SMUSH to automatically optimise every image in two key ways: resizing images to a maximum width of 2,000px, and compressing the file weight. As an example, this process can bring an image down from 2.2 MB to just 320 KB  a dramatic reduction with no visible loss in quality.

At the start of the update, SMUSH had automatically optimised 8,038 images, saving 2.2 GB of data – a reduction of 53.5% across the whole image library.

SMUSH does have its limits. For any image exceeding 5 MB, we manually reduce the file size first using online tools such as TinyPNG, before SMUSH processes it further. The web designer has also gone a step further, if needed, manually refining a number of key images to reduce their weight even more, whilst carefully preserving clarity and sharpness throughout.

PDFs have also been addressed as part of this process. We now use iLovePDF to compress PDF file sizes, typically reducing them to around a quarter of their original weight. Where heavy compression would significantly impact image quality within a PDF, we accept a reduction to approximately half the original size as a reasonable balance.

Technical Optimisation

Many of the improvements come from work that happens behind the scenes and is not immediately visible to visitors.

• Advanced caching
• Improved server and database efficiency
• Updated bespoke template
• Image compression and modern formats (WebP, SVG, AVIF)
• Reduced JavaScript usage
• Better asset loading strategies
• Browser caching and compression
• Streamlined templates and database queries

These changes allow pages to load faster while transferring significantly less data across the internet.

Accessibility Checking

As well as applying common sense throughout the build, all pages are tested using AChecks — a no-nonsense accessibility checker that stands out from most tools because it simply reports the facts, without trying to upsell fixes.

The site currently passes WCAG 2.0 Level AA with:

• Known Problems: 0
• Likely Problems: 0
• Potential Problems: 178*

*Potential problems include known, unavoidable industry conventions like WordPress use of  <i> tags, and intentional alt text decisions made in line with the W3C Alt text decision tree.

Ongoing Monitoring

Performance and environmental metrics will continue to be monitored over time. We’ll be back in a few months with a full breakdown comparing the old and new sites across a complete month of data. Watch this space!