As Google becomes increasingly concerned with websites’ User Experience (UX), optimizing your site for the platform’s top-ranking signals is critical. The most important factors to pay attention to are our page speed and loading times. GZIP
One of the fastest and easiest ways to improve site speed and performance is to enable compression in WordPress. There’s a possibility that your web host automatically enables GZIP compression for you. If not, there are also ways you can take care of this crucial task yourself.
This post will explain what GZIP compression is and how it works. Then we’ll discuss how to check and see whether GZIP compression is functioning on your site and, if not, the three methods you can use to enable compression on WordPress. Let’s get started!
What Is GZIP Compression?
GZIP is a file format and software application used for compression and decompression. It was created by Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler and released as a free software replacement for the compression program used in early Unix systems.
GZIP was intended for use with GNU (open-source, free software) as with the Core WordPress software. The “G” in “GZIP” is from “GNU.”
GZIP compression does not work on images, and it is a mixed bag for media files. For example, some image files like MPEGs and WAVs compress well with GZIP. Other file types, such as MP3s, may actually increase in size if you try to compress them.
It’s also important to note that GZIP compression must be enabled on your web server before you can enable file and folder compression. In a bit, we’ll discuss how to determine whether your web server has GZIP enabled.
On the client side, all modern web browsers support GZIP compression and automatically ask for it when making HTTP requests. This means that you can expect all users to reap the benefits of GZIP compression once you’ve enabled it.
Why Does GZIP Compression Matter?
Compression is commonly encountered in the computer world. Put simply, it is a convenient method of grouping many files together into one smaller file. This helps alleviate some of the issues that arise from having too many large files on your site, which can slow down the loading times of your web pages.
This matters because a slow-loading website can negatively impact UX and impede conversions. In fact, according to Neil Patel, 47 percent of consumers expect a web page to load in two seconds or less. If you’re running an e-commerce business, up to 79 percent of customers say they’re less likely to buy from a website if it provides a poor experience.
Web pages can take up a lot of server space due to large file sizes, especially render-blocking JavaScript files (or JavaScript W3). This is why you should compress JavaScript files of these types as much as possible.
Fortunately, plenty of tools can help you diagnose page loading issues, including Google Pagespeed Insights, GTmetrix, and Pingdom. Once you’ve uncovered a performance problem, you can take action to resolve it.
Also, if you need help with JavaScript specifically, Zac Gordon provides a series of excellent JavaScript for WP courses. You can use them to learn the popular programming language both independently and alongside WordPress.
How Does Compression Work in WordPress?
A mashup of computer languages – HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – is used by almost all modern websites. If you reduce them to their most basic form, you’ll find that websites are essentially text files. This means there are various ways you can optimize your site’s data.
For example, minification is often used to enable text compression in WordPress. You can also compress components with GZIP WordPress compression, equivalent to file compression for websites. It is the process of reducing your website’s file sizes (including HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files).
When users go to your website, their browsers download these text files and render the website according to the code contained within them. That code is then translated to something readable and understandable to human users.
However, browsers don’t require all the extra white space and extra formatting used to improve readability for humans. As long as the browser can analyze the code’s content, it can be written in one long text block.
Therefore, WordPress GZIP compression takes away the formatting mainly used for human understanding. Reducing the length of the code in this way also reduces the size of the file containing it.
WordPress GZIP compression can do wonders for your website’s performance, especially when it comes to improving page loading times. If you have ever searched “how to gzip a file,” then this is the article for you.
Wrapping Up
While there are many ways to improve your WordPress site’s speed and UX, GZIP compression is one of the quickest and easiest options. Some hosting providers enable this feature automatically. However, you have a few choices if you see that GZIP compression isn’t active on your WordPress site.
As we discussed in this post, the three main methods you can use to enable compression on WordPress are:
- Manually edit your site’s .htaccess file to add a few snippets of code.
- Contact your hosting provider to enable it, which is recommended if you aren’t comfortable working with code.
- Install a WordPress plugin to enable GZIP compression, such as WP Rocket*, PageSpeed Ninja, or Enable Gzip Compression.
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