GZip Site Compression for Wordpress Websites
As a website owner, you probably understand the importance of website speed and page loading time.
How quickly your website is available to visitors influences bounce rate, user experience, placement in search results (since speed is a ranking factor) and much more.
In fact, loading speed is so important that a while ago, we published an entire article on that topic.
One of the most effective ways to make your site load faster is with Gzip compression, which is also sometimes called HTTP or browser compression.
If you work with a computer regularly, you probably already know about compression from zip archives. It’s a great way to reduce file size in order to make them easier to transfer.
The same is possible for the files that make up your WordPress website and there are good reasons to do so.
Smaller files will allow your visitors to download them faster and see your site quicker.
Not only does this improve the user experience and makes you site more attractive to search engines but it also results in less server load and bandwidth usage, which is a good thing for performance-based hosting packages.
Reason enough to look at this topic in detail, don’t you think?
Me too. Therefore, in this article, I will show you several ways to enable Gzip compression for your WordPress website so that it can be as fast as it deserves to be.
How Does Gzip Compression Work?
Before we dive into how to implement compression, let’s have a quick look at how it actually works.
Basic Website Architecture
As you probably know, most modern websites consist of a mix of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, which — on the very basic level — are nothing but text files.
When visitors request to see you site, their browsers download these files and render your site from the code contained within.
So far, so good.
However, because the code is usually handled by humans, it is arranged in a way that makes it easy to understand for human eyes.
It’s one of the many reasons why we have WordPress coding standards.
However, machines like your browser don’t need code to be pretty or legible. As long as they can parse it, it can be written in one block or line for all they care.
That’s the reason why a good way to make website’s load faster are code concatenation and minification.
These words mean nothing else than taking away all the formatting that is purely there to make code more legible for people, like comments, line breaks, spaces, and such.
Enter Compression
Doing so can already reduce file size by quite a bit, yet, compression takes this even further.
In order to understand how it works, we have to understand that all code is at least somewhat repetitive.
It’s simply in the nature of programming and web design to have lots of recurring patterns and elements.
Compression algorithms like Gzip take advantage of this fact by replacing repetitive patterns with a sort of shorthand.
To make this clear, let’s pretend we have a piece of code that looks like this:
AAA BBBB CCCCC
With a simple system we can shorten the same code to this:
3A 4B 5C
Easy to understand, right? I just shortened the recurring characters by representing how often they appear with numbers.
It’s simple and if you know the system, you can easily reprocess this back into the original line later on.
However, what’s also remarkable is that this small step reduced our code from twelve characters to merely six, which is a reduction of 50 percent.
While that’s not actually how Gzip works, the idea behind it is very similar if much more complex.
However, on the very basic level, Gzip is nothing but a library for compressing and decompressing data and it works especially well for text-based content like lines of code.
In fact, the algorithm can reduce the size of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files by as much as 70 to 90 percent.
Since all modern browsers not only support Gzip but will actually request it automatically, this makes compression a fool-proof method to speed up your WordPress website.
A Practical Example To show you what that means in real life, for this article I have equipped one of my own websites with Gzip compression that was uncompressed before.
Here is what the situation looked like in the beginning: