Enable gzip and Brotli compression to make pages load faster

Text files such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript compress extremely well. With compression turned on, a 120 KB page travels as about 25 KB, which matters most on phones and slow connections.

Is it on?

The SEO audit checks the Content-Encoding of every page and lists pages sent without compression. You can also see it in your browser's developer tools → Network → the page → Response headers.

Apache

Most hosts have mod_deflate. Add this to .htaccess:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css text/plain application/javascript application/json image/svg+xml
</IfModule>

Nginx

In the http block: gzip on; and gzip_types with the text types above. Brotli needs the ngx_brotli module.

Cloudflare and CDNs

Cloudflare compresses text automatically (gzip and Brotli) for proxied traffic. Check the DNS record has the orange cloud.

WordPress

Caching plugins such as WP Rocket, W3 Total Cache and LiteSpeed Cache can enable compression, as long as your server allows it.

Very large HTML

If a page is over 500 KB of HTML even before compression, look for inline images (base64), huge menus or long product lists rendered at once. Split long lists into pages. For other speed wins, see image optimisation and render-blocking scripts.