There are many better written guides available online than the ones that were here so I have decided to distil all the important bits into the points below:
Enabling strict modes will force you to write better programs. To further improve memory safety and program correctness, maybe use a language like
C#,
Go,
Java or
Rust instead that are stricter and safer by default?
Following on from the above, using a memory safe language will help make your programs more reliable and reduce errors. Memory related errors are causing more problems globally so now may be the time to switch? There are many to choose from, each with their own advantages and disadvantages. If you are not sure and don't want to read the article, C# is a good place to start!
The study "Energy Efficiency Across Programming Languages" showed that in the tests they performed, scripting languages such as Python and Perl did very badly. Moving to any of the safe languages mentioned above will likely speed up the task, make the program easier to maintain, reduce costs and lower your carbon / energy foot print.
By using the minimalist approach of using fewer programming languages (ideally just the one), you reduce the number of compilers you need to keep up to date and languages you need to be familiar with.
Offer 7-Zip archives as well as zip, they can be much smaller in size (around a third) making for faster downloads. If the download is big, making it a self-extracting 7Zip file adds very little to the archive size (about 200KB) and means the user does not need to have 7Zip installed.
Run any PNG image files through OptiPNG (or a similar optimizer). Consider using more modern formats such as Google's WebP.
Tools such as Google's Closure Compiler can shrink JavaScript files massively by removing comments, spaces and renaming variables with shorter names. This can mean quicker downloads and faster start-up. The Closure Compiler can also be used to find errors in your programs, adds type checking and (in some cases) can make them faster by inlining functions and other methods!
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For example, does your program really need an SQL installation? Would a simple CSV file do the job?
A PDF document is much better than an offline website, a PDF is usually much smaller and is easier to search.
A specific point but for some C# projects, this may just be a simple recompile using the .NET Core/8 compiler to get a faster and more memory efficient program.
All simple steps but together can help make software and the web better!
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