Greenhouse Sports
A website refresh to reflect the growth of this London-based sports charity
Project overview
In 2016, we were first approached by the London-based sports coaching charity Greenhouse Sports. We worked with them to create a website to raise the profile of the amazing work they do. With a mission to support young people from disadvantaged communities, this charity has now expanded outside of London, with plans for further expansion across the UK.
When the team approached us in 2023, their site needed a refresh to reflect their new branding, and a performance review to ensure that it would remain fit for purpose and provide a faster, more streamlined user experience.
0.09g
C02 per page view
97%
Homepage Lighthouse Accessibility score
1.9s
Page load time
Clearing out the clutter
Since building the original website in 2017, the team had added a WordPress Elementor plugin to manage and update the site internally.
This led to an excessive amount of content building up on the website over the years, and a less consistent brand experience for those visiting. The additional content also affected the amount of time it took for the website to load, with the homepage loading time taking up to 9 seconds. This reduced the site’s performance and lowered its engagement rate.
Our main focus with this project was to simplify the design and reduce the content, in order to improve site performance.
Streamlined, low-carbon design
Our team created a brand new, low-carbon design for the new website. Working with the existing content, the excess was stripped out, allowing us to create a more streamlined design that’s easier to navigate.
The new design is stripped back and much more striking, with a black background. The darker background is more sustainable, as it uses less power than previous, lighter themed design. This also makes it more accessible for mobile users.
Following our updates, the new website is both visually and environmentally cleaner (down from 0.69g to 0.09g C02).
The homepage page load time also reduced from 9 seconds to 1.9 seconds, making it 21% faster, and 97% more performant overall.
A sustainable success for Greenhouse Sports, for us, and for the planet!
The Wholegrain team delivered a more agile, engaging and navigable site, that ran parallel to a complete brand change for our organisation. Importantly the new site had to pivot to prioritise the fundraising channels and communications and navigation to a donation pathway – all achieved with a much improved visual and tangible user experience.
