Speed up your website - Gzip Compression

byTchelow

725 followers

Updated 8 years ago

One of the few things people think when creating an online business is how fast it is to access it and less often that a fast loading website has more chances to index on Google. One of the main things that can help you increase your site response is enabling Gzip Compression.

Gzip Compression enables your server to compress all data before sending it to whoever is accessing your website, saving, in some cases, a few megabytes of information and making everything much faster.

To enable Gzip Compression you will need to edit a file in your website that can be accessed by FTP or in the File Manager of your host. Note that you can't do it when using siterubix, but I believe that it's already enable for everyone.

The file you need to edit is called .htaccess and can be found on your website root directory. When you find it, make a backup of the file, otherwise if you do something wrong you may lost something important and break people accessing your website.

When you open this file, you'll see something like this:

# BEGIN WordPress

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

</IfModule>

# END WordPress

You will need to add the following lines at the end of file:

# BEGIN GZIP

<ifmodule mod_deflate.c>

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml text/css application/x-javascript application/javascript

</ifmodule>

# END GZIP

Save the file and, if necessary, upload it again to your server replacing your old .htaccess file.

The change should take place immediately and your site speed should considerably increase.

1. I did this to my own website, http://www.boardgamereviewed.com and it was almost 4 seconds faster to load.

If you are having problems with loading speed, I do recommend doing the above. You'll make your visitors happy for loading your site faster and they will also save some data as it'll be compressed.

Have you already enabled Gzip Compression on your website? Tell me your experience with it.