How to Enable GZIP compression its Importance, and Benefits

What is Gzip Compression?

It is a technique to compress and decompress files. It reduces the size of the html, css, and javascript. It is a file format and is enabled on the server side. 

When a user visits your website, the files from the server end are requested by the client’s browser. The server compresses the files and thus reduces the transfer time. On the client’s side the file is first decompressed and then visualized. 

Why Gzip Compression is important?

It is recommended because of the reasons below;

• Sometimes the file size is reduced to 70%.
• It increases the page speed.
• Cost benefit ratio: high

Enable Compression using .htaccess

Compression can be enabled by adding code below to a file named .htaccess on web host/server.  

<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>

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You may also like to read:- Why is HTML Minification Important? How to Minify HTML, CSS?

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Enable Compression on Apache Web Servers

If the above does not work try using below code:

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

Enable Compression on NGINX

Add the below code to the 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;

Enable Compression on IIS

If your are using IIS server, we recommend you to check out Microsoft’s guide:

how to enable compression 

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