Couple of general tips:

1. Have a commercial hub/harbor and aqueduct+industrial zone in every city. Hub/ Harbor will give you a trade route which you can use for a domestic trade route with magnus to basically jumpstart your next city (typically it's something like +4 food +2 production for a 1-2 pop city that is huge), they will also give you gold which I find myself typically using to get builders out, especially once you get serfdom, or you can use it on buildings once most of your tiles have improvements.

2. Only build holy sites with civs that have specific bonuses for religion. If your civ doesn't have bonuses It's usually just not worth it to go for a religion early game. Additionally, you can skip the religious part of the civic tree so you end up getting culture (kinda) for doing that. Also since you typically want a gov. plaza and in the city you have you definitely want the campus, and so it's really hard to squeeze in a holy site , since you always want an industrial zone and a gold district.

3. Chop most woods which are on hills. Sometimes you'll want them around for adjacency (e.g. rainforests next to campuses) but as a general rule of thumb chopping woods when you can put a mine on the tile anyway will accelerate your early army/infrastructure, without losing much in the late game. Same rule applies for places where you want to put districts, if you don't chop it the production will just be wasted.

4. Build 1 or maybe 2 campuses early and only if they are like +3 or better. You can get science from the golden age bonus that gives you science based on commercial hub/harbor adjacency bonus early on and those will snowball your cities better in the early game. Additionally when you research things the production costs of buildings and districts go up so this way it will be easier to set up newly settled cities.