What is gzip compression? Why do we need to enable it?

Gzip is the file format and method of compression and decompression of files using it’s algorithm to reduce the file size. It is used in web server, where web servers  send data to http client with gzip compression for faster data transfer and low bandwidth consumption.

Enabling gzip compression is the best practice and it is highly recommended, so pages are likely to load faster in browsers.

How to check gzip compression enabled or not

You can check if gzip compression is enabled or not on a particular website using following methods.

You can use the google PageSeep Insights tool not only to check gzip compression but also to analyze performance of a website.

You can also check if gzip compression is  enabled on server or not using command line tool curl on linux. Try out the following,

curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip'  http://www.google.co.in

Replace the URL with what ever the website that you want to check for gzip compression.

Where,

-I   means, only make HEAD request to server to get headers

-H    specify the accepted encoding gzip using header ‘Accept-Encoding’

If you see header Content-Encoding with gzip in response headers, then compression is enabled on server and it’s working

It works in such a way that, client would specify it’s supported compression and encoding using header Accept-Encoding. Server will use compression if it is enabled on server else will send plain text back to client. Server will notify encoding format and compression to client through header Content-Encoding in response headers.

Here is the curl request on google.co.in to verify gzip compression

$ curl -I -H 'Accept-Encoding: gzip'  http://www.google.co.in
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2016 16:12:40 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1
P3P: CP="This is not a P3P policy! See https://www.google.com/support/accounts/answer/151657?hl=en for more info."
Content-Encoding: gzip
Server: gws
Content-Length: 4915
X-XSS-Protection: 1; mode=block
X-Frame-Options: SAMEORIGIN
Set-Cookie: NID=83=crFkLu-3gxYf8zmcCt9a7x3nQx2HjZbxugSvdSfft73lKKTw0nSGSL-Tf91NowmbP_eYuu65BpOlV3B2d2phbaGbxkyX3Bx_6GwkY5nmfwne7tS3MWXGNZ3Iz89WhCeS; expires=Fri, 03-Feb-2017 16:12:40 GMT; path=/; domain=.google.co.in; HttpOnly

We can see that, the header Content-Encoding: gzip in response headers. Means gzip compression is enabled.

Enable gzip compression in apache

The gzip compression can be enabled  by directly changing httpd conf file. That is httpd.conf  or you can use .htaccess file to target only specific directory or path or site.

Add the following code to  /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf    if apache is installed somewhere add the that specific httpd.conf file

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

To enable gzip compression via .htaccess, put the following code into .htaccess file which  in the desired site directory.

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file .(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>

Restart the apache. That’s it, apache will compress the response which is being sent to client. Enabling gzip compression absolutely would boost your site performance.

You can test if gzip compression is enabled or not using curl as mentioned in this article.

The gzip compression is recommended on all types of text files including following files and extensions

.html
.php
.css
.js
.txt
.json

But, gzip compression is not recommended on graphic files or .zip (in the sense files which are compressed already). Because by compressing these kind of files we hardly save few bytes. Thus increase in loading time because of added unaffected compression task.

Why GZIP compression ?

As explained, gzip compression saves the lot of bandwidth by reducing file size. It saves up to 50% to 80% of bandwidth. So, it reduces download and waiting time of browser for resources. If you enable gzip compression, it won’t affect unsupported browsers, where they can fallback to normal(no compression) data download.

Summary

GZIP compression is process of zipping or compressing files on server before they get delivered or transferred via network to browser. Browser will uncompress the data before it uses. As it saves 50% to 80% of bandwidth, if it enabled performance of  website will increase considerably.