Auditing your site
To zero-rate any website, a mobile operator would need to make sure that all network traffic that an end user generates is on a single top level domain.
This is not straight forward, and it's the bulk of the work you'd need to do if you wanted to zero-rate your website.
To understand what would be involved, go to your website in your browser, have developer tools open and look through all of the network requests that are generated by browsing around.
In order for your site to be zero-rated every single one of these requests must change to be via your top level domain.
You should make a record of each of these requests to third party services. For each one, you will need to choose an appopriate approach to zero-rating.
For Oak National Academy, for each of the third-party services we had on our site, we researched which was the appropriate path to take:
- Remove it
- Find a self-hosted alternative
- Find an alternative that allows for a custom domain
- Proxy it through a Cloudflare Worker on a subdomain
- Re-build the functionality as our own component
As you can imagine, removing or finding alternatives is a lot cheaper than rebuilding functionality yourself. But sometimes that is not possible. For instance, if you are embedding Youtube videos, essentially your website cannot be zero-rated unless you move to a provider that can serve video via your own domain.
The end result of this audit might be that to achieve zero-rating is prohibitively expensive to achieve for your website. For a normal school website that uses any common third-party embeds or third party analytics, this will most likely be the case.
Mobile Network Operators can only zero-rate your website if all requests that the visitor triggers during a visit are via your top level domain. Any request that goes to a third party will stop you from being able to achieve zero-rating.
Once you have made an audit, take a look at the approaches section for ideas on how to zero-rate each of your third party services.