Website Performance Optimization Strategies

Performance is a game of inches. You win by saving bytes everywhere. A fast site improves SEO, conversion rates, and user retention.

1. Image Optimization

Images account for 60% of web page weight.

• Next-Gen Formats: Use WebP or AVIF instead of JPEG/PNG. They are 30% smaller with the same quality.
• Lazy Loading: Don't load images below the fold until the user scrolls down. Add loading="lazy" to your <img> tags.
• Responsive Images: Use srcset to serve small images to mobile phones and large images to 4K desktops. Don't send a 5MB hero image to an iPhone.

2. Minification and Compression

• Minify: Remove spaces, comments, and long variable names from JS/CSS files. (Build tools like Webpack/Vite do this automatically).
• Compress: Enable Gzip or Brotli compression on your web server (Nginx/Apache). This shrinks text files by 70% during transfer. Brotli is superior to Gzip for static assets—enable it if possible.

3. Tree Shaking

Don't import the entire library if you only need one function. Bad: import _ from 'lodash'; (Imports 70KB) Good: import debounce from 'lodash/debounce'; (Imports 1KB) Modern bundlers (Webpack, Rollup) "shake" the tree to drop dead code that isn't actually used in your application bundle.

4. Caching Policies

The fastest network request is the one that never happens. Configure your Cache-Control headers.

• Immutable Assets: Hashes in filenames (e.g., main.a1b2c3.js) allows you to cache them for 1 year (max-age=31536000).
• HTML: Should have shorter cache times (e.g., no-cache) to ensure users always check for the latest version of your site structure.