Gzip compression what is it

Brotli shows great promise for compression static assets. You can check it out to learn more about Brotli. A well-optimized web is great for everyone. Users love snappier websites, website owners love the reduced hosting charges, and web hosts love the optimization achieved on their servers.

Compression techniques like GZIP are one of the best ways to speed up page load times for your visitors. Kinsta enables it by default on all its servers, but for others, this article covers multiple ways to enable GZIP compression on various web servers. Speed is critical for any website. Just compress! All of that and much more, in one plan with no long-term contracts, assisted migrations, and a day-money-back-guarantee. By submitting this form: You agree to the processing of the submitted personal data in accordance with Kinsta's Privacy Policy , including the transfer of data to the United States.

You also agree to receive information from Kinsta related to our services, events, and promotions. You may unsubscribe at any time by following the instructions in the communications received. Your current host could be costing you time and money — get them back with Kinsta. Learn more. Kinsta Blog. Salman Ravoof , November 9, The main components of a webpage. File size compression of uncompressed vs minified jQuery.

A rough illustration of how GZIP compression works. An illustration of the LZ77 encoding algorithm. Huffman codes are unique binary codes for every character. An 80 bits word encoded as a 25 bits string. Sign Up For the Newsletter. Testing Kinsta. View the compressed vs uncompressed page sizes in Chrome Devtools. GZIP warnings in various webpage speed testing tools. Example of Apache. Brotli support across various browsers.

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APM tools help to find performance bottlenecks, monitor issues, and lots more. Check out all the best APM tools on the market in ! Thus the encoded files take up less space. In simple terms, when the file size is compressed or reduced, the process of transferring files becomes faster.

However, it is important to note that GZIP compression does not work on image files. For images, web owners have to reduce the size using other tools, like tinypng. The unique identifiers are decoded back to the original size of the data when the file is unzipped.

Ideally, you should enable GZIP compression when first making your website public. First, open your website in Google Chrome. To open the developer tool, right-click anywhere on the page and select Inspect. Once the page fully loaded, your results should look something like the screenshot above.

Under Response Headers, check the content-encoding status. If it says gzip, then your website has GZIP enabled. The answer is a definite yes! And we can see that by doing a simple check using a website analyzing tool like app. In our example, the website owner saved That is quite impressive. Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting. The size of the web is growing exponentially. From to , the average size of a website increased from 2.

Considering 1. The question is, how do we keep websites fast even as they get bigger and bigger? One answer is in data compression using gzip. Gzip is a data compression algorithm capable of compressing and decompressing files quickly.

The name also refers to two other technologies: the software used to compress and decompress files, and the format those files are stored in. Gzip can compress almost any file type, from plain text to images, and is fast enough to compress and decompress data on-the-fly. Web servers use gzip to reduce the total amount of data transferred to clients.

When the web server receives the request, it generates the response as normal, then checks the Accept-Encoding header to determine how to encode the response. If the server supports gzip, it uses gzip to compress each resource. It then delivers the compressed copies of each resource with an added Content-Encoding header , specifying that the resource is encoded using gzip.

The browser then decompresses the content into its original uncompressed version before rendering it to the user.

However, this comes at a cost. Compression is a CPU-intensive process, and the more you compress a file, the longer it takes. Because of this, gzip offers a range of compression levels from 1 to 9; 1 offers the fastest compression speed but at a lower ratio, and 9 offers the highest compression ratio but at a lower speed. The gzip application uses level 6 by default, favoring higher compression over speed.

Compression is a simple, effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site. I hesitated when recommending gzip compression when speeding up your javascript because of problems in older browsers.

Most of my traffic comes from modern browsers, and quite frankly, most of my users are fairly tech-savvy. Google and Yahoo use gzip compression. A modern browser is needed to enjoy modern web content and modern web speed — so gzip encoding it is. Before we start I should explain what content encoding is.

The conversation goes a little like this:. Words are repeated throughout the document. If we could send a. The browser-server conversation might look like this:.