Speed Up WordPress Website using Compression in 5 minutes

GZip Compression

WordPress is memory intensive and is a memory hog. The fact that it occupies lots of CPU resources and memory is nothing new. One of the best ways to optimize your WordPress website is by using compression.

What is Compression?

Compression can also be applied to websites just like files, folders are compressed in formats like .zip , .rar etc. In websites, HTTP compression, otherwise known as content encoding, is a publicly defined way to compress textual content transferred from web servers to browsers. HTTP compression uses public domain compression algorithms, like gzip and compress, to compress XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, and other text files at the server.

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 on their websites.

How to use G Zip Compression in WordPress

Compression reduces response times by reducing the size of the HTTP response. Gzip is the most popular and effective compression method currently available and generally reduces the response size by about 70%. Approximately 90% of today’s Internet traffic travels through browsers that claim to support g zip.

If you want to take advantage of GZIP compression ( and we do recommend this ), then you WILL need an .htaccess file to accomplish that part. GZIP compression is something that should really be enabled at the Apache level or inside your php.ini file. GZIP compression can be used for things like JavaScript and CSS files as well, so why bother turning it on for only WordPress generated pages when you can enable GZIP at the server level and cover all the bases.

If your installation of Apache does not have mod_deflate installed. You can also enable GZIP compression using PHP configuration alone. In your php.ini file, you can simply add the following line anywhere: zlib.output_compression = on

Easiest Way to Enable G Zip in WordPress

If you want to enable GZIP, in your WordPress installation directory put the following few lines in the .htaccess file and that is all there is to it. GZIP is now enabled!