One of the most important things about a website is its loading speed. To be successful, it must load quickly and be error-free. When your site loads slowly, most users don’t wait. They look for another site to help them. Your site needs to load faster than competitors to be successful.
People these days lose patience fast. They expect everything to happen quickly and easily. Therefore, when your site does not load quickly, they go to the competition.
Google includes page load time as one of the factors in its ranking algorithm. The faster your site loads, the higher you will rank. If you are interested, you can browse our SEO services.
The easiest way to speed up your WordPress site is to remove all the unwanted resources. The second way to speed it up is to compress all its desired resources. Enabling GZIP compression on your web server is one of the easiest and most effective ways to achieve it.
All modern browsers include support for GZIP compression by default. However, to serve your users’ compressed resources without problems, you need to configure your server properly.
In this blog post, you will learn the basics of data compression on the web, what GZIP is and how you can use it to speed up your site.
What is compression
Generally speaking, compression is the process of reducing the size of files and is achieved using a compression algorithm. The compression method can be lossy, which means that some of the information is lost in the compression process, or lossless, which means all information from the original file is preserved in the compressed file.
A website is a group of related files stored on a web server. When you enter a URL in your browser, your browser sends a request to the webserver that hosts the content you want. The server processes your request, retrieves the correct files from its database – including HTML and all related CSS, JavaScript, and media files – then sends the files to your browser as an HTTP response. Finally, your browser renders the files into what you see as a web page. Every data transfer takes time. Mostly depending on the size of the transferred files – the more data there is to send, the longer a page loads.
To load faster, web servers compress files before sending them to browsers. Once the browser receives the compressed response, it quickly decompresses the content.
What is GZIP compression?
GZIP compression is a popular method used to reduce the size of web files – including HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. GZIP is the current standard for compressing files on the network.
GZIP was introduced in 1992 and was originally intended for use by GNU (hence the “G” in GZIP) as a free open-source alternative to proprietary compression methods at the time. This accessibility has contributed to the ubiquity of GZIP.
GZIP implements the lossless DEFLATE algorithm, which finds and removes duplicate characters in text files. It can reduce the amount of data by up to 70%.
The main reason we use GZIP is that it is usually faster than other methods. It compresses files in less time than other methods. This speed is crucial for data transfer over the network. Ultimately, the purpose of compression is to speed up websites.
You can use the GZIP compression check tool to check if it is already activated on your website. If GZIP is already enabled, the tool will show you the page size before and after the optimization. If not, an error message will appear.
How to enable GZIP compression
Because GZIP compression is on the web server, the configuration process will depend on your hosting provider and server architecture.
We recommend checking your hosting provider’s documentation for instructions on enabling GZIP compression before trying the methods below. Your host may not recommend or even allow you to modify server files.
How to enable GZIP compression in WordPress
WordPress is a CMS software, not a server configuration. However, if you run a WordPress website, you can install a performance plugin that modifies the server files. It is possible with performance optimization packages such as WP Super Cache, WP Rocket, or PageSpeed Ninja. There is also Enable Gzip Compression.
Consult the correct documentation or contact your host if you encounter problems activating GZIP compression in this way.
Most plugins are easy to install, activate and use. There is nothing complicated as long as you know what you are doing. In most cases, you need to follow a few easy steps. To enable GZIP compression with WPRocket, for example, you need to:
First, you need to install and activate the WP Rocket.
When activated, your license key must be activated automatically for you. You can check this by going to the Settings > WP Rocket page in your WordPress administrator. You should see a message informing you that WP Rocket is active and running.
WP Rocket automatically activates GZIP compression if you use an Apache server, and most WordPress web hosting providers use Apache. You do not need to take any additional steps.
Enable GZIP compression with WP Super Cache:
First, you need to install and activate the WP Super Cache plugin. After activation, go to Settings> WP Super Cache page> Advanced in your WordPress dashboard. Then check the box “Compress pages so they’re served more quickly to visitors.”.
Then you need to scroll down the page and click the ‘Update Status’ button to save your changes. WP Super Cache will then enable gZip compression on your website.
As you can see, the steps are easy, and anyone can follow them. Don’t hesitate, because the loading speed of your website is of great importance for your success.
WordPress has many different plugins that can help you add everything you need to your website. In our blog, you can find out which are the best WordPress plugins for your website.
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