Tips to Speed Up Your Site
- Optimize images: Compress and resize to actual display dimensions, then serve in modern formats like WebP or AVIF. Use native lazy-loading via
for off-screen images to reduce bandwidth and improve first paint.
- Minimize HTTP requests: Bundle and minify CSS/JS, inline critical styles, use CSS sprites for icons—each round-trip adds latency.
- Enable caching: Use \Cache-Control headers or ETags, version your assets so browsers reuse them, and set long expiry for static files.
- Use compression: Turn on Gzip or Brotli at server level (Apache/Nginx). Brotli typically compresses better than Gzip, especially for text formats.
- Reduce render-blocking: Inline critical CSS, defer scripts with defer or async, and prioritize loading above-the-fold content for faster interaction.
- Leverage a CDN: Serve static assets like images, fonts, and scripts from distributed edge servers (e.g., Cloudflare, CloudFront) to lower latency.
- Implement HTTP/2 or HTTP/3: Modern protocols support multiplexing and header compression—improving responsiveness over old HTTP/1.1.