Content Delivery

Content delivery optimization reduces the size and transmission time of HTTP responses through compression, modern image formats, and asset minification. Brotli compression (RFC 7932) achieves 20–26% better compression ratios than Gzip for text assets at the same CPU cost, and is supported by all modern browsers. WebP provides 25–34% smaller images than JPEG/PNG at equivalent quality; AVIF (AV1 Image Format) provides 50% smaller files than JPEG. These techniques directly impact Core Web Vitals scores (LCP, CLS) and Google search ranking.

Key Points

• Brotli compression: 20–26% better than Gzip for HTML/CSS/JS; requires HTTPS (only served over secure connections); Nginx: `brotli on; brotli_comp_level 6;`.
• Gzip: fallback for older clients and non-text content; enable with `Content-Encoding: gzip`; level 6 is sweet spot of compression ratio vs. CPU cost.
• WebP: 25–34% smaller than JPEG/PNG; supported by all modern browsers; serve via `<picture>` element with JPEG/PNG fallback for older browsers.
• AVIF: next-gen format with 50% smaller files than JPEG using AV1 codec; Chrome 85+, Firefox 93+, Safari 16+; slower to encode but worth it for static assets.
• Minification: remove whitespace, comments, and shorten identifiers in JS/CSS — Terser (JS), cssnano (CSS), html-minifier reduce asset sizes 20–40%.
• Tree shaking: remove unused JavaScript exports at bundle time — Rollup and Webpack 5 eliminate dead code, cutting bundle size 30–60% for large libraries.
• Code splitting: lazy-load route components and below-fold features — reduces initial bundle from 1MB to &lt;200KB, directly improving Time to Interactive (TTI).
• Sprite sheets and icon fonts vs. SVGs: inline SVGs are preferred for icons — eliminate HTTP requests, style with CSS, scale perfectly, smaller total payload.