How to speed up website with Gzip compression

The amount of data to be sent from the server to the user’s browser will decrease dramatically if Gzip compression is enabled on a website. And thereby your website’s loading speed will decrease by a great amount.

Now compressing your website will help you in many ways it will strengthen your website. Here are some of the advantages of enabling the Gzip compression on your website.

Benefits of Enabling Gzip compression on a website:

• Decrease the bouncing rate of your website. Because most of the visitors close your website even before looking at it, if it is loading too slowly.
• Become more preferable on Search engines due to Gzip enabled.
• Save your bandwidth by compressing. This will reduce your server load.
• Better user experience.

Different ways to enable Gzip Compression

1. W3 total cache Plugin

The one of the simplest way of Gzip compression is activating a plugin named W3 total Cache that has many other option as well to reduce your website loading speed. For enabling this option in the W3 Total Chache plugin, just follow the below given steps.

• After activating the W3 Total chache plugin, now go to the Performance>> Browser Chache option

• Now scroll down a little bit and you will see an option of Gzip compression just tick the option.

• Now save the settings and just refresh your website page. See if the website is working fine. 
• Your job is done, now Gzip compression has been enabled.

How to Check if Gzip compression is really enabled?

Just go to the website: Check If Gzip Enabled

And check it out if Gzip compression is ticked here.

2. Enabling gzip via .htaccess file

Before making any changes backup your .htaccess file.

You can also enable the gzip compression on your website by simply making some changes as discussed below to your htaccess file.

Just add the below code to your .htaccess file at the end of the file.

If you don’t know how to edit htaccess file using FTP server then Click here to check How do I edit .htaccess file from wordpress dashboard.

3. Enabling http compression plugin

You can also enable the Gzip compression by activating one plugin naming: http-compression.

But I would recommend that you make changes to the .htaccess files for this purpose as enabling lots of plugins on your website is not a good option and its increase your server load.

Now to check if your website has enabled the Gzip compression go to : Click here

That’s it, your website has now been compressed and now you will see a dramatic change in the loading speed of your website and also a change in traffic to your website within few days.

Hope you enjoyed the article, do share it with your friends. And comment if any problem occurs.

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Originally posted 2014-05-24 17:23:31.