GZIP WordPress Enabling Tutorial

Speed is at the top of every website owner’s wishlist. The faster the site, the better is the experience, which leads to more conversions. Also, Google ranks pages that load more quickly higher in search results. So you have an excellent reason to eke out every last millisecond you can from your website. One particular way to do speed optimization WordPress sites is by GZIP. The absolute best way to make things load faster is to make them smaller.

That’s just what GZIP does. We’re going to show you how to enable it and make sure your page is blazing fast, even if you already have image compression and other settings set up and optimized.

GZIP WordPress Compression

GZIP is an optimized file format and a software aa for file compression and decompression. Jean-loup Gailly and Mark Adler created GZIP compression. Its free software for the reduction in old systems.

As with the WordPress core software in general, GZIP was used for GNU (free open source software). The ‘G’ is from “GNU.” WordPress GZIP compression is the process of reducing the size of your website files, including codes like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

The GZIP technique does not work on images. However, it is a bag when it comes to media files. For example, some images files, such as MPEG and WAV files, compress well with GZIP, while other file types, such as audio folders, may increase in size if you try to squeeze them.

GZIP compression must be enabled on your webserver to work you to enable file and folder compression (web servers with GZIP enabled will return the content-encoding: GZIP header in its response).

From 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.

Enabling GZIP Compression

There are two methods of enabling GZIP compression: modifying the .htaccess File or using a WordPress plugin, like WP Rocket. Using a WordPress Plugin, The easiest way to enable GZIP compression in your WordPress site is to install a plugin. It will be a lot easier and safer than modifying the .htaccess File. There are a lot of plugin choices available, but we have singled out these 3 WP plugins because of their features and ease of use:

WP-Optimize

An all-in-one solution to boost your website performance. The plugin will enable GZIP compression and web caching. In addition to that, it will clean unnecessary files on your website. This tool can even optimize images to free up more space!

Hummingbird

You have more freedom to choose what aspects you want to optimize. GZIP compression, minification, and lazy load offscreen images are some of its main features.

WP Fastest Cache

WP Fastest Cache combines its caching prowess with GZIP compression to make your page fast and lightweight. This tool can also automatically disable emojis and optimize every single post.

Since these plugins can do so much more than enabling GZIP compression, I suggest that you try all of them to see which one fits you best. After all, they are free and frequently updated, what’s not to love?

This method is quite technical, so it’s more suitable for advanced users. However, anyone can do it as long as they are careful. Before we continue, remember that you should always back up your .htaccess File first if something goes incorrect.

.htaccess

You will need to download an FTP client, like Filezilla, to locate the .htaccess File. It is usually present in the public_html index of your website. Download the File and save a copy on your computer as a backup. Then, paste these following Codes before # END WordPress line of .htaccess. Follow this code.

Upload the edited File to the same location. If FileZilla asks permission to overwrite it, click OK.