As part of a project to rebuild our websites, National Museums Scotland developed an approach to website carbon management. 

In August 2024, we relaunched our websites, nms.ac.uk and afnms.org. This was a major project, led by our Digital Media department and partner agency Supercool. 

As well as fully rebuilding the website in a new content management system (Craft CMS), the project sought to improve the accessibility and usability of the site, which resulted in revisions to the site architecture and refreshments to the overall look and feel. We also committed to understand and reduce the carbon footprint of the website.

Publicly accessible monitoring tools

Throughout the rebuild we made design decisions to keep carbon page weights low – therefore lowering the overall carbon footprint of our site. We’ve been using the Digital Carbon Online dashboard to monitor carbon page weights across the site. 

On 6 July 2025, Digital Carbon Online updated their tool to use Sustainable Web Design Methodology (SWDM) v4. This means the figures on our dashboard will be notably lower than they were before this change. This is a reflection of the change to the tool, not a sudden drop in our overall footprint.

Find out more about the switch to SWDM v4.

We've also included the Website Carbon Calculator in our footer, which shows the carbon weight of each page. Our Digital Media team can use this as a guide while designing and updating content.

Ongoing work

We are committed to addressing climate and biodiversity challenges, taking action across our whole organisation: our people, programmes, places and processes. 

We’ll continue to keep accessibility and carbon management at the fore of our thinking as we develop the website and its contents. 

This is a new way of working for us. There will be lots more for us to do, and lots more for us to learn. We will continue to be open and transparent as we develop our approach to managing our website in this way.