
To obtain better loading time of your site onto the browsers you should setup the GZIP compression. Instead of transmitting the plain version of your HTML, CSS, JS files the server will compress them then send them over to the browser that will unzip them and show them to you. This gain of speed will make difference in loading time.
What is GZIP:
GZIP is a file format and a software used to compress and uncompress files. The GZIP compression is activated on the serveur side and allow to reduce the size of the HTML an other text based file formats, it will not work with pictures and other binary format which use another type of compression. In certain cases people have seen reduction of size up-to 70%. This is one of the most easy optimisation that you can put in place on your site.
GZIP or not GZIP:
To verify if your server is configured to provide the GZIP compression, you can use this free site to check the status of the GZIP setup, or this corporate site for the GZIP configuration of your site
Configuring properly the GZIP compression will only give you bonus points in the eyes of any search engines such as Google, Yahoo as you site is smaller and therefore easier, faster to browse. It will give you extra points in your aim to get a better SEO for your site.
How to activate GZIP:
Apache Server
On an Apache server you need to create (if it does not already exist) a file: .htaccess that contain the below lines:
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers) BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html Header append Vary User-Agent </IfModule>
If you have a WordPress, that file probably already exist and you must copy the information below any other existing information on that file.
NGINX Server
On a NGINX server you need to add the following line to your nginx.conf file:
gzip on; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)"; gzip_vary on; gzip_types text/plain text/css text/javascript image/svg+xml image/x-icon application/javascript application/x-javascript;
IIS Server
If you are using IIS server, there are 2 type of compression available to you: static and dynamic. We strongly suggest you to refer to the Microsoft guide on the matter of activating compression.