Best Ways to Optimise Website Content Delivery
Tags: webdev, blockchain, tutorial, frontend
Published: 2023-03-08 18:00:13

## Overview

Optimising website content delivery is crucial to ensure your website loads quickly and provides a great user experience. This post will discuss some of the best ways to optimise website content delivery.
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## Minify CSS and JavaScript Files

Minimising CSS and JavaScript files involves removing unnecessary characters like comments, white spaces, and line breaks to reduce the file size. This step helps to improve loading times and the overall performance of your website. Developers commonly use tools such as Webpack and Vite to minify CSS and JavaScript files.
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## Preload & Pre-Connect

Preloading and pre-connecting are techniques to optimise website content delivery by allowing resources to load in advance. These few lines of code can significantly improve your website's loading times by reducing the time it takes to fetch resources.

There are many other loading methods, but this could be its entire blog (`dns-prefetch`, `prerender`, `modulepreload` etc.). So we will keep it simple with the most common ones.

Here's an example of how to use preload and pre-connect in your HTML:

```html
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
  <head>
    <link rel="preconnect" href="https://example.com">
    <link rel="preload" href="https://example.com/style.css" as="style">
    <link rel="preload" href="https://example.com/script.js" as="script">
    <link rel="stylesheet" href="https://example.com/style.css">
  </head>
  <body>
    <h1>Welcome to My Website</h1>
    <p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.</p>
    <script src="https://example.com/script.js"></script>
  </body>
</html>
```

The above ensures the optimal loading of the assets needed on `https://example.com`.
<br>


## Optimise Image Loading

Images can significantly impact website loading times. Optimising the image format and size and using lazy loading can improve your website's performance.
<br>

### Optimise the Image Format and Size

Optimising the image format and size can reduce the amount of data that needs to transfer to the user, improving website performance. So when it comes to formats, always optimise for what you need, taking into account requirements such as transparency (PNG vs JPEG), scalability (JPEG vs SVG), browser support (JPEG vs WebP) etc. 
<br>

In addition, you can use tools like [CompressJPEG](https://compressjpeg.com/) etc. to compress images without sacrificing quality; usually, images can be reduced by about 20% without losing visible quality.
<br>

### Lazy Load Images

Lazy loading images can significantly improve the performance of your website by deferring the loading of images until they are needed. You can use the `loading` attribute in the `img` tag to implement lazy loading.

Here's an example of how to use lazy loading with the `loading` attribute:

```html
<img src="example.jpg" alt="Example Image" loading="lazy">
```
This ensures the image is only loaded when needed, speeding up the time to first paint! 
<br>


## Use Content Delivery Networks (CDNs)

Using Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is another way to optimise website content delivery. CDNs use a distributed network of servers worldwide to deliver your website's content. When a user visits your website, the content is served from the server closest to them, reducing the distance the content needs to travel and resulting in faster loading times.

Decentralised Content Delivery Networks (dCDNs) are an emerging technology that promises to revolutionise how we deliver and consume online content. Unlike traditional CDNs that rely on centralised servers, dCDNs use a network of decentralised nodes to distribute content making them faster, more secure, and more resistant to downtime and cyber attacks. [BlokHost](https://blok.host) is a notable example of a dCDN that is gaining popularity. 

[BlokHost](https://blok.host) is built on blockchain technology, which provides enhanced security, transparency, and decentralisation. By leveraging the power of dCDNs like BlokHost, website owners can further optimise their content delivery and provide a better user experience with the increasing demand for fast and reliable content delivery.
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## Summary

In conclusion, optimising website content delivery is essential to ensure that your website loads quickly and provides a great user experience. You can significantly improve your website's loading times and performance by minifying CSS and JavaScript files, using CDNs, preloading and pre-connecting resources, and optimising image loading.