What can I do to serve text-based webpages more efficiently?

For context I am trying to get a webserver up and running with low specs (think Raspberry Pi level) and want it to serve text content to as many users as possible.

I have tried looking up general tips, and this was helpful...but I can't believe that it's completely pointless to use Javascript to de-encode a website that's been compressed. If I took a simple cipher to replace each instance of '<div' with a special character I know I would never serve (some of these maybe), wouldn't I already be saving some bandwidth? A JS search and replace on the client side can't take more than a fraction of a second.

So my question is are any of these novel methods for speeding up simple websites worth it in the end? Are there other methods I am not considering?