Could you name a few online compression tools?

You can use online compression tools to check whether gzip is enabled on your website/page. 1. GZIPCompression Testing tool 2. online gzip test 3. WebPageTest

GZIP Compression: Top 10 Interesting FAQs

Q: What is mod_deflate?

mod_deflate is quick and it works very well. In any case, Apache webserver checks if the internet browser delivered the “Accept-encoding” header. Then it returns the compressed or regular edition of the file. However, some older browsers may have trouble compressing or decompress and there are some special directives you can add to correct this behavior.

Q: How to Test ZIP Compression is enabled?

Once you've configured GZIP in your webserver, check to make sure your webserver actually serving compressed content to the client's browser. Approach 1: Via Online Approach 2: In Your Web browser Approach 3: View the Live HTTP Headers

Contents hide

1. GZIP Compression: Speed Up & Optimize Your Website

2. Introduction To GZIP Compression

3. What is GZIP Compression?

4. Why we need Compression?

5. How does the Compression Scheme Negotiation happen Between Browser & Server?

6. How compressed files work on the web?

7. How GZIP Compresses data of a web page?

8. How to Verify if Compression is Enabled?

9. What are pre-requisites for Enabling ZGIP Compression in WordPress?

9.1. Step 1 — Enabling Compression

9.1.1. Two Methods of Compression

9.1.2. Option 1. Editing .htaccess file to enable GZIP on Apache webserver

9.1.3. Setting up the server

9.1.4. a) Compression via mod_deflate (recommended)

9.1.5. b) Compression via mod_deflate

9.2. Option 2. GZIP Via Plug-Ins

9.3. Option 3. Enabling Compression via cPanel

9.4. Option 4. Enabling Compression in Windows-based hosting

9.5. Option 5. Enable GZIP on NGINX

9.6. Option 6. Enable GZIP on IIS

9.7. Option 7. Enable Gzip compression on Litespeed webservers

10. Step 2 — Testing Compression of ZIP

10.1. Verify Your Compression

10.1.1. Approach 1: Via Online

10.1.2. GZIP Warning in GTmetrix

10.1.3. GZIP Caution in Google PageSpeed Insights

10.2. Approach 2: In Your Web browser

10.3. Approach 3: View the Live HTTP Headers

11. What is web browsers way of telling the server that it can accept GZIP compressed file?

12. What is server’s way of telling the web browser that it sent GZIP compressed file?

13. What is the impact of GZIP compression on server?

14. How to Verify if Compression is Enabled?

15. How to Test GZIP Compression on macOS?

16. Could you provide the overview of Compression?

17. What is compression?

18. How to check the HTTP Header in Developer Tools?

19. What are the caveats of GZIP Compression?

19.1. Older browsers

19.2. Do Not Compress the resources which are already compressed

19.3. Low CPU Load time

19.4. Pre Compress static content

19.5. Saves bandwidth

20. How to know if GZIP Compression is working?

21. How to Use GZIP Test Tool?

21.1. Step 1:Insert your domain URL in corresponding field

21.2. Step 2: Interpreting the GZIP Compression Checker Tool Results

22. What are most accepted content encoding algorithms?

23. What is the importance of GZIP Compression Test?

24. May i Use Gzip Compression in Conjunction with a content delivery networks (CDNs)?

25. Does all servers support gzip compression?

26. Does all modern browsers support and automatically negotiate gzip compression?

27. What enabling GZIP Compression can do?

28. What are the Alternatives to GZIP Compression?

29. Does most of the modern browsers supports Brotli Compression?

30. Does most of the modern servers supporting Brotli Compression?

31. Does WordPress supports Brotli Compression?

32. Does CDNs supports Brotli Compression?

33. What Brotli Compression is famous for?

34. What are the Advantages of GZIP Compression?

34.1. Decent Compression Ratio

34.2. Compression and Decompression Speeds

34.3. Consumes Very Little Memory

34.4. Does not Expand Much Even in Worst Cases

34.5. Free to Use and Open Source

34.6. Enjoys Universal Support

35. What is entropy encoding?

36. Does Cloudflare can gzip my website content too?

37. What file formats does GZIP Compression supports?

37.1. .gz files

37.2. .tar files

37.3. .tgz, .tar.gz, .gz files

38. Conclusion

GZIP Compression: Speed Up & Optimize Your Website

Introduction To GZIP Compression

When a visitor sends a request for a page to your site via the client’s browser, a request is sent to your website server to deliver the requested file/information. The webpage may include HTML, CSS, JS and any media you have on the page. The larger these files are, the longer it will take time to load in browsers. This applies even if you’re lazy loading or asynchronously loading content. That content still needs to load in the browser. You can load a page faster by loading everything at once rather than all at a time. But you still have to contend with sending the files. The larger the files, the longer they take to send to the browser. By compressing your resources such as a webpage, CSS, JavaScript, HTML files before sending them over to the browser you will significantly reduce the loading time as the files will be smaller.

To accomplish a fast webpage load on your own WordPress site, it is necessary to decrease the size of your website’s webpages. Enabling it to help decrease the size of your web pages. It will significantly reduce the quantity of time to download the webpage. Further, reduce data utilization for your client, and enhance the time to 1st render of your webpage(s).

Nowadays, All browsers support it. Further, They automatically negotiate it for all requests of HTTP/HTTPs. In this post, we will talk about it in length. And, provides information on how to check and allow it on your web server.

What is GZIP Compression?

Gzip is a file format & a method to compressing files such as HTML, JS, CSS etc for faster network transfers. It is done by making files smaller in size. Compression allows your server to serve smaller document sizes which load faster for your site visitors

GZIP is a technique used for document compression and decompression. It can be enabled at the server-side and permits a further reduction in how big is your HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files. Usually, images are already compressed & can be compressed in different ways. It a known fact that it can do up to 70% reductions.

When a browser visits a website it checks to see if the webserver has GZIP enabled simply by seeing if the “content-encoding: gzip” response header exists. If the header can be detected, it delivers the compressed and smaller sized files. If not really, is delivers the uncompressed files.

Why we need Compression?

It is really beneficial in a web environment. It is because HTML, CSS files use a lot of repeated text and spaces. Once you perform it on a webpage, You may notice that it compresses the size of pages, CSS, JS, & HTML file size by up to 60-70%.

Http Request And Compressed HTTP Response

Standard Vs Compressed HTTP Request & Response Snapshot

When you request a page like sitemap, your browser interacts with the website’s web server. And, The conversation may go such as this:

HTTP Request & Response
Internet browser: Hey, GET me /sitemap.xml
Server: Ok, Let me see if sitemap.xml is present with me…
Server: Found it! Here’s your response code (200 Okay) and I’m sending it.
Web browser: 100KB? Ouch… waiting… waiting..waiting… okay, finally, it’s loaded fully.

Nonetheless, Your request has been served, and you have your page. But, the problem is that it’s not really that efficient. Here, 100KB will be a lot of text messages. HTML is usually redundant. Every ,

and

tag includes a closing tag. Also, Terms are repeated throughout the entire document. In fact, HTML isn’t lean.

Let me ask you one question.

what’s the solution when a file’s too large to send?

Your answer may be, simply Zip it before sending it to the browsers & vice versa.

Yes, You are right.

If we’re able to send a .zip document to the internet browser (Ex: pindex.html.zip) rather than the usual way of the uncompressed file (pindex.html), we would save bandwidth and increased the download speed of the page. And, The web browser may download the zipped document, extract it, and show it to the visitor. It makes the visitor happy since the page is loaded quickly.

Once the HTTP request is compressed, the browser-server conversation may look like below:

Browser: Hey, may I GET /pindex.html? I can handle the compressed edition of files.
Server: Let me find that page.. yep, it’s available. And you’ll have a compressed version? Awesome.
Server: Here is your response code (200 OK), am zipping it and sending it to you.
Browser: Great! It’s just 10KB. I’ll unzip it and show it to the visitor.

Here, please note that a Smaller file means faster download & a happy visitor of the website along with web browser.

How does the Compression Scheme Negotiation happen Between Browser & Server?

Browser Gzip Request And Server Response

Browser Gzip Request & Server Response Snapshot

The whole negotiation between browser & server is done in simple two steps.

1. The browser transmits HTTP request with header informing the server that it accepts compressed content. It can be either gzip and deflate. These are 2 well-known compression schemes available for compression. Ex: Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

For Content-Encoding, Accept-Encoding filed is used & for Transfer-Encoding, the field TE is used.

GET /encrypted-area HTTP/1.1
Host: www.auniqueweb.com
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate

The “Accept-encoding” header is only a demand by the internet browser, not really a demand.

2. Then, The server transmits a reply containing one or more compression schemes it supports. if the content material is in fact in compressed form, It sends a response with Content-Encoding: gzip. In fact, The outgoing request data may be compressed by one or more methods supported by both parties. So, the server will add a Content-Encoding or Transfer-Encoding field in the HTTP response with the available compression schemes, separated by commas.

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: mon, 26 June 2016 22:38:34 GMT
Server: Apache/1.3.3.7 (Unix)  (Red-Hat/Linux)
Last-Modified: Wed, 08 Jan 2003 23:11:55 GMT
Accept-Ranges: bytes
Content-Length: 438
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Encoding: gzip

If the server doesn’t send the content-encoding response header, this means the file isn’t compressed. In other words, If the server doesn’t want to send compressed content to the web browser, the web browser has to put up with the heavy standard version.

The most tricky part of this exchange is the browser and server knowing upfront it’s ok to send a zipped file over.

The compression method used by the web server solely depends on the internal settings of the web server. Further, it may also depend on the internal architecture of the site.

How compressed files work on the web?

For example, When a request is made by a browser for a file of your website, your web server returns the smaller compressed file if the browser indicates that it understands the compression. Nowadays, All most All browsers understand and accept compressed files.

How GZIP Compresses data of a web page?

Gzip locates similar strings within document types such as CSS and HTML files. It replaces those strings temporarily with some placeholders. It is to make the overall file size smaller.

Do you know the reason why these compressions work so well in a web environment?. It is because these document types such as CSS files and HTML files use a lot of repeated text and have loads of white space. Since It compresses common strings, it may reduce the size of pages and style sheets by up to 60-70 %!

How to Verify if Compression is Enabled?

There are many ways to verify the compression of GZIP on websites. Here are two approaches often used by webmasters.

1. Online Compression Testing Tool

The first and quickest way to check if compression is enabled on your own site is to check it via Compression Testing tool. Please provide your website URL and click on the search button. The tool will either return the total amount that was preserved by compressing the web page with GZIP Or it’ll return an error helping you discover GZIP isn’t enabled. As you can plainly see in our check below, we saved almost 64% of the total size.

And, also understand that GZIP pertains to your static property aswell. Which means that in case you are serving resources from a CDN, you need to ensure that the compression is allowed. All modern CDN companies such as Cloudflare, KeyCDN, and CloudFront support it.

2. Via HTTP Response Header “content-encoding: gzip”

The second way to check is to verify if the “content-encoding: gzip” HTTP response header is active on your website. This is exactly what the browser searches for when it transmits a request to the server. You may start Chrome Devtools and look at your initial response header beneath the network section.

You can also go through the “view large requests” choice and it’ll show you the initial and compressed size of the web page.

What are pre-requisites for Enabling ZGIP Compression in WordPress?

Before you Enabling ZGip Compression you need the following:

Access to .htaccess file on the webserver
cPanel access (optional)

Step 1 — Enabling Compression

Assume it is not enabled in our webserver. we have different ways to start enabling it on your own web server.

Compression is enabled via webserver configuration
Different webservers have different instructions. Those are explained below for you.

Here are the most common ways to enable compression includes .htaccess, Apache, Nginx, and Litespeed web servers.

Two Methods of Compression

You can enable it on your website using either mod_gzip or mod_deflate algorithm. The compression with mod_deflate is generally recommended. And, it is compatible with a higher version of Apache webserver.

Two compression choices are available to allow HTTP compression:

1. mod_deflate is simpler to set up and is a typical standard.
2. mod_gzip: it is more powerful since it helps to pre-compress content.

mod_deflate is quick and it works very well. so you may use it or use mod_gzip if that what you prefer. In any case, Apache webserver checks if the internet browser delivered the “Accept-encoding” header. Then it returns the compressed or regular edition of the file. However, some older browsers may have trouble compressing or decompress and there are some special directives you can add to correct this behavior.

If in case, you can’t change your .htaccess file, you may use PHP to return compressed content. Also, Give your HTML file a .php extension and add below code to the top of it (for PHP).

if(substr_count($_SERVER[“HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING”], “gzip”)){
ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”);
}else{
ob_start();
}
?>

Option 1. Editing .htaccess file to enable GZIP on Apache webserver

If you have access to webserver, you may edit .htaccess file & update the related code. The code enables it on webserver. Most shared hosts make use of Apache, where you may add the code mentioned below to your .htaccess document. You could find your .htaccess document at the main of your WordPress site via FTP.

Before you enable it, Make sure the mod_filtration system is loaded on your own server. Otherwise, the AddOutputFilterByType directive won’t work and could result in a 500 mistake. We recommend looking at your mistakes in a log file in case you have any problems with the code below.

Setting up the server

The important thing you have to know is that we can’t control the web browser. it either sends the Accept-encoding: gzip, deflate header or it generally does not.

Our job is to configure the server so that it returns zipped content only if the browser can handle it. Thus saving bandwidth for webserver & Client’s browser.

Our work is to configure the server so that it returns zipped content material if the browser is designed for it. Thus, we may conserve bandwidth for everyone.

a) Compression via mod_deflate (recommended)

It is enabled by updating the below code in your .htaccess file. It is a recommended approach for enabling it. Please, make sure that you add it all below the existing contents of your .htaccess file.

Once you add code in .htaccess file to enable it, Save the changes to the file.

That’s essentially a listing of MIME types that gzipping will be applicable. Feel free to alter the file types as per your need.

# Compress Text,HTML, CSS, JavaScript, XML and fonts
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
# For Older Browsers Which Can’t Handle Compression
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

If you wish to download file, you may down it from Here.

Note
1. If in case your server does not support mod_deflate, you may try the mod_gzip scheme.
2. In case you don’t have access to web server, you may use plugins to enable it for your website.

b) Compression via mod_deflate

mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$

Once it is updated, compression will be allowed.

Option 2. GZIP Via Plug-Ins

It is the easiest way to enable it. When it isn’t enabled in the WordPress website, online web tools like Google PageSpeed Insight offer you a caution to enable it. There are a couple of methods for you to fix this caution.

1. The first and the least difficult option is by utilizing a caching plugin that facilitates enabling it on your website. You can allow Enable HTTP (gzip) compression through caching plugins like W3 Total Cache or GZip Ninja Speed Compression. Apart from the above plugins, There are many plugins available for WordPress. For example, WP Rocket, adds compression code in your .htaccess document automatically using the mod_deflate module. In case, you installed W3 Total Cache, it offers a way to allow this for you under its overall performance section.

2. In Joomla, you can gzip your website via System -> Global Configuration -> Server section.

Option 3. Enabling Compression via cPanel

If you have a cPanel access, you can enable gzip for all websites under your hosting account using the Optimize Website section.

Under the Files section, go for the File Manager menu.

cPanel will popup a note requesting you where you desire land within your site web directories. In the same windows, you will notice the checkbox requesting if you want to show hidden documents. Check the checkbox Display Hidden Documents and click the Go button to show hidden documents.

Under the general public_html folder of your site, discover and edit the file called .htaccess file.

Paste the below code into .htaccess file by the end of your existing code.

Option 4. Enabling Compression in Windows-based hosting

If you are using a Windows-based web server, you can enable HTTP compression for static and dynamic content using the below command-line instructions.

appcmd set config /section:urlCompression /doDynamicCompression:True
appcmd set config /section:urlCompression /doStaticCompression:True

Option 5. Enable GZIP on NGINX

If you are using NGINX, simply add the below code to your nginx.conf document.

gzip on;
gzip_disable “MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)”;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_types text/simple text/css text/javascript picture/svg+xml picture/x-icon application/javascript program/x-javascript;

Option 6. Enable GZIP on IIS

If you are working on IIS webserver, we recommend looking into Microsoft’s guide about how to enable compression. Microsoft IIS broadly has two various kinds of compression. They are dynamic and static.

Option 7. Enable Gzip compression on Litespeed webservers

The correct way to allow compression in Litespeed is to accomplish it through the configuration under “tuning”.
Just go below to “enable compression” and check to see if it is on. In case if not, click “edit” & then choose to turn it on. And, look over there for several compression options that are nearby.

Step 2 — Testing Compression of ZIP

Verify Your Compression

Once you’ve configured your webserver, check to make sure your webserver actually serving compressed content to the client’s browser.

Approach 1: Via Online

You can use the online compression tools to check whether gzip is enabled on your website/page.

In the event that your web server does n’t enable it, you may likely see warnings and mistakes in online speed testing tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.

GZIPCompression Testing tool

online gzip test

WebPageTest.org

GZIP Warning in GTmetrix

GTMetrix also offers a recommendation to allow compression to lessen the transfer size of the static assets.

GZIP Caution in Google PageSpeed Insights

As you can see, Google says that compressing assets with GZIP or deflate may reduce the number of bytes sent over the network.

Approach 2: In Your Web browser

Use Web Developer Toolbar > Information > View Document Size to see whether the page is compressed.

Approach 3: View the Live HTTP Headers

Use Live HTTP Headers to examine the response. Look for a line that says “Content-encoding: gzip”.

What is web browsers way of telling the server that it can accept GZIP compressed file?

accept-encoding: gzip
This is the web browser’s way of telling the server that it can accept GZIP compressed files.

What is server’s way of telling the web browser that it sent GZIP compressed file?

Lets assume that browser send the “accept-encoding: gzip” request header of web browser.
If the server sees gzip in the “accept-encoding” request header of web browser, Server compress the file with GZIP compression. And, server sends the below header in the response to web browser.
content-encoding: gzip
This above header response tells the web browser that the file server sent to web browser must be decompressed using GZIP before displaying it to the user.

What is the impact of GZIP compression on server?

Enabling GZIP compression on a server will vary depending on your server configuration. However, you may verify that files are being GZIP compressed/decompressed by looking at the below two headers in the request/response lifecycle for a resource.
accept-encoding: gzip [From Web Browser to Server]
content-encoding: gzip [From Server to Web Browser]

How to Verify if Compression is Enabled?

When a server sends a compressed file to your favorite browser, the content-length response header reflects the transfer size (compressed version) of the message-body in bytes.
You can verify gzip compression status by downloading an HTTP-served file and comparing the file size on your machine with the content-length size.

How to Test GZIP Compression on macOS?

Here is the command to test GZIP Compression on macOS.
gzip -c test.css > test.gz
If you compare the file before compression w.r.to the file after compression, you will come to know whether compression is happened as per your expectation.

Could you provide the overview of Compression?

Compression helps to reduce the size of files sent from your server to increase the speed to which they are transferred to the browser. Compression Reduce the sizes of web pages by up to 70% of its original file size. It Increase webpage speed. The Cost benefit ratio of compression is high.
For compression, Access needed to be given to the .htaccess files or server administration files of server.

What is compression?

Lets assume that When a user hits a webpage of a website, a call is made to your server to deliver the requested files. The bigger these files are the longer it is going to take for them to get to your favorite browser and appear on your screen.
Gzip/Brotli compresses your web pages and style sheets before sending them over to the favorite browser. It do reduces the transfer time of file since the files are much smaller. If you consider the cost vs benefit, compression must be near the top of your webpage speed optimizations if you do not have it setup already.

How to check the HTTP Header in Developer Tools?

To check for GZIP compression without an external tool, you may use the developer tools panel in your favorite browser. Most modern browsers let you inspect page elements of a webpage and view performance data of it.
First, load the webpage you want to check in your favorite browser. Then, open the developer tools panel of the browser and do select the Network tab. There you will see a list of all the resources/files sent by the webserver. if not, you may need to reload the web page. Click one resource to view its contents. Please do make sure that you have selected the Headers tab, and then scroll down to the content-encoding header. It helps to see which method was used.
Therefore, You may See that how a resource was compressed with GZIP using Chrome Developer Tools:

What are the caveats of GZIP Compression?

As exciting as it may appear, GZIP Compression has certain caveats of GZIP Compression. They are mentioned below.

Older browsers

Some of the browsers still may have trouble with compressed content of files. For instance, Netscape 1.0 on Windows 95. Apache mod_deflate has rules to avoid compression for older browsers.

Do Not Compress the resources which are already compressed

Most images, music and videos are already compressed. Please do not waste time compressing those resources again. In fact, you probably only need to compress HTML, CSS and JavaScript resources.

Low CPU Load time

Compressing content on the fly may use Low CPU time. Usually it is a great tradeoff by the given the speed of compression.

Pre Compress static content

There are many ways to Pre-Compress static content of a website and send over the compressed versions of the files. However, it requires more configuration in some use cases. Using more CPU time for a faster user experience is well worth it.

Saves bandwidth

Compression of the content saves bandwidth too.

Therefore, Enabling GZip compression is one of the fastest way to improve your web site’s performance. Go forward, to set it up, and let your users/visitors enjoy the benefits of GZip Compression

How to know if GZIP Compression is working?

You can use the either Online Compression Checker Tool (or) Developer Tools to verify whether GZIP Compression is working. Please select the Network tab, choose the filename, and look at the Headers tab on the right side of it.

How to Use GZIP Test Tool?

GZIP Compression Checker checks whether GZIP compression is enabled on the webserver hosting the website. GZIP Compression Checker tool will connect to your server hosting your website and display whether compression is enabled.

Here is Step by Step Guide of testing GZIP compression Tool.

Step 1:Insert your domain URL in corresponding field

Type the Https domain URL you want to test in the corresponding field of GZIP Compression Checker tool. It will perform a quick GZIP Compression test and display information about compressed and uncompressed files on a particular website. Please do take a closer look at the details. For instance below, we checked https://auniqueweb.in/ website.
Check GZIP compression of a webpage Image

Step 2: Interpreting the GZIP Compression Checker Tool Results

In the screenshot below with the auniqueweb.in results, you get information about whether GZIP Compression is used at the website.

What are most accepted content encoding algorithms?

Here are the accepted content encoding algorithms. They are
1. Deflate
2. Gzip
3. Brotli
Almost all modern web browsers understand these content encoding algorithms.

What is the importance of GZIP Compression Test?

With GZIP Compression Tester Tool, you can check if your website has enabled GZIP Compression. By simply connecting to your domain and requesting the necessary information, GZIP Compression Tester tool will show the result whether GZIP Compression is used on a website.
This way, you may find out if GZIP Compression is connected to the website. And if not, you may fix the issue to get more traffic from search engines. In addition to that, GZIP Compression has a positive effect on the user experience.

May i Use Gzip Compression in Conjunction with a content delivery networks (CDNs)?

Almost all Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) provide automated file compression with gzip Compression. This relieves you of the need to verify that GZIP compression is enabled.
And, Content Delivery Networks typically support a number of front-end optimization techniques. It can be used in conjunction with gzip Compression to further shrink outgoing files size. For Instance, minification reduce the size of a resources such as JavaScript, HTML and CSS by half before the GZIP compression.
Therefore, Content Delivery Networks perform both minification and gzip compression. Thus minimize the size of the files delivered to your Visitors/Users by significantly reducing webpage load time.

Does all servers support gzip compression?

Yes, Almost all of the servers support GZIP compression. You can enable and test the gzip compression support on your server. Alternatively, You may please view documentation of your server on how to enable GZIP compression.

You may find your favorite server in the list of servers below. You may find your favorite server is configured with recommended settings.
Here are the list of your favorite server & the configuration with recommended settings.
Apache: Use mod_deflate
Nginx: Use ngx_http_gzip_module
IIS: Configure HTTP Compression

Does all modern browsers support and automatically negotiate gzip compression?

Yes, All modern browsers support & automatically negotiate gzip compression for all HTTP requests.

What enabling GZIP Compression can do?

By Enabling GZIP compression you may achieve the following. They are
1) reduce the size of the transferred response. That too up to 90%.
2) reduce the amount of time to download the resource,
3) reduce data usage for the client,
and 4) improve the time to first render of your web pages.

What are the Alternatives to GZIP Compression?

As we all agree that The world of data compression on the web is advancing Rapidly. With the average webpage weight size has been increasing constantly, web technology too is trying to catch up with it to make transferring data over the web more efficient. Over the past few years, Brotli compression algorithm has gained widespread popularity. Initially, Brotli compression’s main focus is to compress WOFF2 web fonts. However, since then it has expanded to support compression for any type of data. Brotli Compression compresses data better than GZIP. However, it may require considerably more time and resources to compress the data. Its decompression time is more or less comparable to that of GZIP Compression.

Does most of the modern browsers supports Brotli Compression?

These days, Most of the modern browsers supporting Brotli Compression.

Does most of the modern servers supporting Brotli Compression?

To supportt Brotli Compression, your website must follow one of the below.
a) Host your website with a hosting provider that supports Brotli Compression.
b) Hosting provider must allow you to install the Brotli libraries.

Does WordPress supports Brotli Compression?

Usually, Most of the managed WordPress hosts do not support Brotli Compression outright yet. using it on WordPress websites is slightly tricky.

Does CDNs supports Brotli Compression?

However, if you use a CDNs (such as Cloudflare, KeyCDN), you can enable Brotli Compression easily.

What Brotli Compression is famous for?

Brotli Compression is famous for compressing the static assets.

What are the Advantages of GZIP Compression?

Here are the most important advantages of GZIP compression. They are

Decent Compression Ratio

Though GZIP does not have the best compression ratio when compared to its competetors, Typically, it can help you reduce the size of text-based resources by 70-90%.

Compression and Decompression Speeds

Regarding data compression and decompression speeds of data, GZIP is the clear winner when compared with other competetors. Higher compression and decompression speeds of data is highly desirable in HTTP servers and other data streams.

Consumes Very Little Memory

GZIP Compression consumes minimal memory. This Property of GZIP Compression making it one of the most suitable for servers and systems with limited memory capabilities. Hence, it is supported by the cheapest webhosting providers.

Does not Expand Much Even in Worst Cases

Lossless data compression techniques such as GZIP Compression have a strict limit. GZIP Compression can not compress data beyond which they can not compress data. GZIP Compression is highly resistant to entropy encoding effect.

Free to Use and Open Source

It is primarily created as a free, open source. This is a replacement for the patented compress program used by the early Unix Operating systems. Thus, It may be used freely by any one.

Enjoys Universal Support

According to a report published on WWW, GZIP compression is used by more than 83% of all the websites. It is making it the most widely used compression algorithm across the World Wide Web. GZIP compression is supported by almost all servers and Browsers. No matter which server you host your website on, you can speed it up by enabling GZIP compression on it.

What is entropy encoding?

Typically, when the resource is already compressed or if it is tiny and the overhead of adding the GZIP dictionary is higher than the benefits of compressing the data, then this phenomenon is called as entropy encoding.

Does Cloudflare can gzip my website content too?

Yes, Cloudflare has been using gzip to compress website content.

What file formats does GZIP Compression supports?

GZIP can support the following 3 file formats. They are

.gz files

It denotes the file extension of GZIP files.

.tar files

tar format is used to store various archive files, But it does not compress data. GZIP is used here to shrink .tar files.

.tgz, .tar.gz, .gz files

GZIP may compress all the .tgz, .tar.gz, .gz file formats very efficiently.

Conclusion

GZIP Compression can help you reduce the quality of a web document. Be it like HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript documents. It can reduce the size to the subject of 60% or much less of its initial size before these data files get delivered to the browser of a user. This compressed document is then served to the web browser of the user. Browsers Then decompress it instantly to load the entire original document in the browser once again. Enabling it is ideal for enhancing page speed because these potential customers will have to download much smaller sized web documents as the initial types when browsing your webpages. It boosts the download time for these data files.

GZIP is quite common nowadays. In fact, it is enabled by default on all servers. All most all modern browsers handle the “content-encoding: gzip” HTTP response header. All modern browsers like chrome, firefox support it.

HTTP response size may be reduced by using Compression. GZIP is the most well-known and effective compression technique available for HTTP response. It generally decreases the response size to 60-70%.

Therefore, webmasters need to make sure that the server is properly configured to provide the compressed source when requested by your client’s browser. It means that it takes much less time to load your web pages, and very less bandwidth is used over all.

GZIP Compression: Top 10 Interesting FAQs

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GZIP Compression: Speed Up & Optimize Your Website

Introduction To GZIP Compression

What is GZIP Compression?

Why we need Compression?

How does the Compression Scheme Negotiation happen Between Browser & Server?

How compressed files work on the web?

How GZIP Compresses data of a web page?

How to Verify if Compression is Enabled?

What are pre-requisites for Enabling ZGIP Compression in WordPress?

Step 1 — Enabling Compression

Two Methods of Compression

Option 1. Editing .htaccess file to enable GZIP on Apache webserver

Setting up the server

a) Compression via mod_deflate (recommended)

b) Compression via mod_deflate

Option 2. GZIP Via Plug-Ins

Option 3. Enabling Compression via cPanel

Option 4. Enabling Compression in Windows-based hosting

Option 5. Enable GZIP on NGINX

Option 6. Enable GZIP on IIS

Option 7. Enable Gzip compression on Litespeed webservers

Step 2 — Testing Compression of ZIP

Verify Your Compression

Approach 1: Via Online

GZIP Warning in GTmetrix

GZIP Caution in Google PageSpeed Insights

Approach 2: In Your Web browser

Approach 3: View the Live HTTP Headers

What is web browsers way of telling the server that it can accept GZIP compressed file?

What is server’s way of telling the web browser that it sent GZIP compressed file?

What is the impact of GZIP compression on server?

How to Verify if Compression is Enabled?

How to Test GZIP Compression on macOS?

Could you provide the overview of Compression?

What is compression?

How to check the HTTP Header in Developer Tools?

What are the caveats of GZIP Compression?

Older browsers

Do Not Compress the resources which are already compressed

Low CPU Load time

Pre Compress static content

Saves bandwidth

How to know if GZIP Compression is working?

How to Use GZIP Test Tool?

Step 1:Insert your domain URL in corresponding field

Step 2: Interpreting the GZIP Compression Checker Tool Results

What are most accepted content encoding algorithms?

What is the importance of GZIP Compression Test?

May i Use Gzip Compression in Conjunction with a content delivery networks (CDNs)?

Does all servers support gzip compression?

Does all modern browsers support and automatically negotiate gzip compression?

What enabling GZIP Compression can do?

What are the Alternatives to GZIP Compression?

Does most of the modern browsers supports Brotli Compression?

Does most of the modern servers supporting Brotli Compression?

Does WordPress supports Brotli Compression?

Does CDNs supports Brotli Compression?

What Brotli Compression is famous for?

What are the Advantages of GZIP Compression?

Decent Compression Ratio

Compression and Decompression Speeds

Consumes Very Little Memory

Does not Expand Much Even in Worst Cases

Free to Use and Open Source

Enjoys Universal Support

What is entropy encoding?

Does Cloudflare can gzip my website content too?

What file formats does GZIP Compression supports?

.gz files

.tar files

.tgz, .tar.gz, .gz files

Conclusion

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