GZip or ZLib Compression

This is perhaps the easiest way to significantly increase the speed of your Wordpress websites without installing any plugins or trying to minify your website's code. For me, this resulted in my sites loading 3-4 times faster than what they did before.



A little bit of background before I give you the steps: ZLib will give you the chance to compress the PHP that is being transmitted after a visitor's request, resulting in a faster displaying time on the browser at the far end. It's a loss-less data-compression library and you don't have to worry about your content being compromised in any way.

To enable it follow the steps below:

STEP 1:

First you have to do a very quick check to make sure that your server has zlib enabled. You can do this by placing the following line into a text file (use notepad), saving it as test.php and then uploading it to your website's root directory on your server:

<?php phpinfo(); ?>

Visit this test page you've just uploaded (i.e. go to www.mysite.com/test.php) and it should give you all the details about the PHP running on your server. All you have to do is scroll down to the zlib header and just check that it is enabled. If it is enabled proceed straight to step 2, otherwise request from your host to enable it for you. ZLib is a feature that web hosts don't mind enabling, so do make this extra step, I can assure you it's worth the try.

STEP 2:

Log into your Wordpress Dashboard and then go to Appearance -> Editor and from all the available files, click on the header.php. Place the below two lines directly above your Doctype at the beginning of the file (and in between the ?php opening and ? closing statements).

<?php
ini_set(’zlib.output_compression’, ‘On’);
ini_set(’zlib.output_compression_level’, ‘1′);
?>

Make sure you update the file to save the changes. Now load your site and browse through your posts and pages. You should notice a huge difference (you can also test your website's address to see if zlib is properly enabled using this tool from WhatsMyIP.org)! Let me know in the comments below.