What is gzip compression?

It is an efficient method of compressing files  and it allows your web server to provide smaller file sizes which load faster for your website users. Enabling it is a standard practice nowadays. If you are not using it, your webpages are likely slower than your competitors.

Compression of HTML and CSS files with gzip typically saves around fifty to seventy percent of the file size. Saving consistently on page load time and bandwidth used.

How to enable gzip compression?

Gzip compression is enabled on a webserver level and each webserver has a different set of instructions. Let's see how can it be achieved on the most common type of webserver available today.

Always consult a developer if you're unsure about what to do.

.htaccess

This method works on Apache webservers. You have to locate (or create) a file called .htaccess in your website root directory and add these lines of code:

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>

mod_gzip_on Yes

mod_gzip_dechunk Yes

mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$

mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$

mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*

mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*

mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*

mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*

</ifModule> 

Save and refresh your page.

Apache

If the above method is not working you have to try in a different way, by adding these lines of code to the .htaccess file instead:

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript 

NGINX

On a NGINX webserver you have to add these lines of code to your config file:

gzip on;

gzip_comp_level 2;

gzip_http_version 1.0;

gzip_proxied any;

gzip_min_length 1100;

gzip_buffers 16 8k;

gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript;



# Disable for IE < 6 because there are some known problems

gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)";



# Add a vary header for downstream proxies to avoid sending cached gzipped files to IE6

gzip_vary on; 

Litespeed

You have to go in the configuration under "tuning", look for "enable compression" and check to see if gzip is on, if not click "edit" then choose to turn it on.

How to check if gzip is enabled on your server?

Use insert the url of your website here.