What is gzip compression

Compression is a simple, effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site. I hesitated when recommending gzip compression when speeding up your javascript because of problems in older browsers. Most of my traffic comes from modern browsers, and quite frankly, most of my users are fairly tech-savvy. Google and Yahoo use gzip compression.

A modern browser is needed to enjoy modern web content and modern web speed — so gzip encoding it is. Before we start I should explain what content encoding is. The conversation goes a little like this:. Words are repeated throughout the document. If we could send a. The browser-server conversation might look like this:. Using an online tool is the easiest way to check if GZIP compression is enabled on your website.

Tired of subpar level 1 WordPress hosting support without the answers? Try our world-class support team! Check out our plans. Most website speed testing tools will warn you for not using compression like GZIP to serve your webpages. Important: As always, take a backup of your site and server configuration files before editing them.

The easiest way to enable GZIP compression on your WordPress site is by using a caching or performance optimization plugin. WordPress plugins require permissions to modify files on your web server. Note: Kinsta has optimized its platform for high-performance, reliability, and security. This also includes enabling GZIP compression by default for all its hosting plans. According to Netcraft , Apache serves more active sites than any other web server in use today.

They will direct Apache to compress server output before sending it to clients over the network. The first option is strictly for sysadmins , as hosting providers rarely allow you to edit the main server configuration file.

The second option is ideal for most WordPress site owners as many shared hosting providers allow you to edit. Then add the below code snippet to it. Add the code above only after the existing directives of your. Save the file and then check whether it enables GZIP compression on your server. Your web server should now serve compressed files for all the file extensions listed above.

You can confirm this by using any of the methods mentioned before. You can learn more about all the directives used here by going to its code repository and following all the resources linked in there. As per Netcraft, Nginx is the most used web server by web-facing computers. Even Kinsta uses Nginx to power its performance-optimized hosting solutions for WordPress. To start off, add the directives given below to your nginx. If your site serves large JS and CSS files, then you can increase the buffer size used for compression by adding the following directive to your nginx.

Finally, you should test to see if your server has GZIP compression enabled. IIS is mainly deployed in enterprise environments running on Windows, especially for setting up company-specific intranet and extranet servers.

You may also find this Stack Overflow thread helpful. The world of data compression on the web is always advancing. With the average page weight size increasing constantly, web technology is trying to catch up with it too to make transferring data over the web more efficient.

A new compression algorithm has gained widespread popularity over the past few years: Brotli. Brotli compresses data better than GZIP, but it requires considerably more time and resources to compress the data. Most browsers support Brotli today, but using it on WordPress sites is still somewhat complicated.

You must host your site with a hosting provider that supports Brotli or allows you to install the Brotli library. Brotli shows great promise for compression static assets.

You can check it out to learn more about Brotli. A well-optimized web is great for everyone. If it says gzip, then your website has GZIP enabled. The answer is a definite yes! And we can see that by doing a simple check using a website analyzing tool like app. In our example, the website owner saved That is quite impressive.

However, there are two main reasons why reducing the file size is important — loading speed is one, and then there is bandwidth. In other words, how much space does a file takes on your servers, and how fast is it presented to your users.

Naturally, a large file will occupy more space, and it will take more bandwidth whenever a user accesses it. This will cost you more, but it will also slow down your page speed, affect your user experience, and ultimately your Google Rank. So, is GZIP efficient? Yes, yes it is. Should you enable it on your website? As established from the metrics above, one of the main advantages of GZIP compression is that it optimizes your page for speed.

And, since page speed is critical when it comes to SEO and Google ranking of web pages then your answer is yes. Even more so, slow loading web pages contribute to bad user experience and a high bounce rate. As I recall, there was a bug in early versions of IE6 that would break gzip, but web servers implemented work-arounds for that, and IE6 itself was fixed in WinXP SP2, so there really aren't going to be many people still using the broken version.

Yes, but a all common browsers and servers support it, and b compression is negotiated between the browser and server for each transaction, so any lack of support by uncommon clients is handled automatically. So computers are fast but the internet is slow, so we want to send a smaller file over the wire. But if it's a fast server and I have a good internet speed and I'm using an android phone with a slow CPU, could gzip cause a slower web page load? Does decompression ever take longer than downloading?

Curtis: Does decompression ever take longer than downloading? Not for any practical example. The only things where the gzip is not worth it are files that are already heavily compressed. Devesh Devesh 4, 1 1 gold badge 13 13 silver badges 26 26 bronze badges.

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