Wordpress: Enabling GZIP compression

Question

According the GTMetrix Page and Googe Pagespeed I need to enable for many ressources the GZIP compression. But www.checkgzipcompression.com says GZIP is enabled. How can I enable my GZIP Compression?

Answer 1

www.checkgzipcompression.com will count GZIP enable even if GZIP is enabled for a single filetype only while pagespeed tools like Pingdom and GTMetrix want you to integrate GZIP compression for all the file types out possible.

You can enable GZIP compression both manually by updating your .htaccess or by using a plugin which will do the same for you but with a user friendly UI.

If you want to enable GZIP compression manually, add the following code to your .htaccess file in your WP root directory.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    # Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/vnd.ms-fontobject
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-opentype
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-otf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-truetype
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-font-ttf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/opentype
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/otf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE font/ttf
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/x-icon
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

    # Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
    BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
    BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
    Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>

The above code is for Apache server. If you're on NGINX server, use this code instead in nginx.conf file:

gzip on;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_types text/plain text/css text/javascript image/svg+xml image/x-icon application/javascript application/x-javascript;

Now, GZIP compression can be enabled with many caching plugins, popular of them is W3 Total Cache. Check this article on how to setup W3 Total Cache and it's GZIP compression module.

Code Source