How to Enable GZIP Compression on WordPress Website (2 Easy Ways)

Does a performance testing tool such as PageSpeed Insight or GT Metrix recommend your WordPress site to have GZIP compression? Do you wanna enable GZIP compression on your WordPress website and wanna make it faster?

GZIP compression can decrease your WordPress websites’ delivery time and improve website performance.

Well, today in this article we are going to know what is GZIP compression and how we can enable it on our WordPress website.

What is GZIP Compression

GZIP is a sort form of GNU Zip is a very amazing compression algorithm that compresses and decompresses data for the web. It allows you to compress your website’s HTML, Style Sheets, and Scripts into GZIP. GZIP compresses all the losslessly and its compression doesn’t affect your site look or design.

When GZIP is enabled the browser receives the data in GZIP compressed format and the visitor browser decompresses this data and renders it in the user’s browser.

All the popular and modern web browsers, server software, WordPress hosting companies support GZIP compression. And it is widely used on many websites for better performance and faster speed.

Depending on the data GZIP algorithm can compress files up to 70% which is a lot when every byte counts.

Note: GZIP compression doesn’t compress your website’s images or videos you need to compress them with a different method.

How to Check GZIP Compression?

Before doing anything first you need to know if your site already has GZIP compression or now because most of the modern hosting company enables it by default.

One of the very amazing and free tools to check GZIP Compression is Gift of Speed, just head over to their website and paste your website URL and hit check. It will show you if your website has GZIP Compression enabled or not.

enable gzip compression test

Performance testing tools such as PageSpeed Insight, GT Metrix, and Pingdom can also be used to check GZIP compression status of your website but they are not as straightforward as Gift of Speed. They show you the warning with the title of “Text Compression”.

How to Enable GZIP Compression?

There are two methods of enabling GZIP Compression on your website one via hosting or the second via plugins and we are going to know about both of them.

1. Hosting

Most of the WordPress hosting provider supports GZIP Compression by default and most of them are enabled automatically but in case if it isn’t enabled you can contact your hosting provider and ask them if they support GZIP Compression and enable it for your website.

If they don’t support GZIP Compression consider changing your hosting provider.

2. Plugins

In the world of WordPress, everything can be done by plugins and GZIP is no exception, there are several free and paid plugins available for enabling GZIP Compression on your WordPress website. Just install and run them and you are good to go.

One of the best free plugins for GZIP compression is Enable GZIP Compression (Update: Currently temporarily removed and under review) and as the name suggests it is pretty straightforward. Some premium plugins such as WP Rocket, NitroSpeed also give the option to enable GZIP Compression.

Some other good free plugin for GZIP compression is W3 Total Cache, WP Super Cache.

What is Brotli?

Since we are talking about GZIP and compression you also need to know about Brotli which is getting a lot of popularity and is also being widely used as a compression algorithm by many hosting providers.

Brotli is another compression algorithm which is developed by Google and it is as powerful as GZIP compression.

If you test your site for GZIP on Gift of Speed and see your site is using Brotli don’t panic your site is just fine and you don’t need GZIP for your site.

Conclusion

Now you should know all about GZIP compression and how you can test and enable GZIP Compression on your WordPress website. You are also fine with Brotli if it is already enabled on your website.

Since your main objective of reading this article is your website performance, I will highly recommend you to check our other articles written on WordPress Website Page Speed, it can help you improve your site performance drastically.

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