If you wish to make your WordPress website faster, increase the SEO ranking and invite more traffic, you must know about GZIP compression. It assists in compressing all the files on your website using the GZIP file format. As files get compressed, they require less space on the site, and hence loading speed improves. In simple words, your site becomes swifter to access. But before we begin learning how to enable GZIP compression to speed up your WordPress website, let us learn a bit about GZIP Compression first.
What Is GZIP Compression?
GZIP compression is a mainstream technique used to decrease the size of web files — including HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript. That way, your site speed will improve, since visitors will download the compressed data rather than the full-sized files. Besides, Google incorporates page loading time as one of the variables in its ranking algorithm. The quicker your site loads – the higher you’ll rank. Thinking about the advantages of GZIP compression, it’s important to check if your site has empowered it. You can utilize the Check GZIP Compression tool to do as such. Suppose GZIP is now enabled. The tool will show you the page size before and after the optimization. If it’s not, an error message will show up.
Enabling GZIP Compression to Speed Up WordPress sites
GZIP Compression can be enabled in two ways: by making changes to the .htaccess file or using a WordPress plugin, like WP Rocket. We will see both of them in detail.
Using a WordPress plugin to enable GZIP Compression Plugins are the best alternative to do manual tasks. Installing a plugin to enable GZIP compression on your WordPress website is the easiest and the safest way. There are several plugins available. However, three are widely popular.
- WP-Optimize: It is the best answer to boosting your website performance. The module will empower GZIP compression and web caching. Notwithstanding that, it will clean pointless files on your website. This tool can even perform optimization of images to let loose more space!
- Hummingbird: With this, you have more opportunity to pick what angles you want to optimize. GZIP compression, minimization, and apathetic burden offscreen images are a portion of its fundamental highlights.
- WP Fastest Cache: WP Fastest Cache joins its caching ability with GZIP compression to make your page quick and lightweight. This tool can likewise naturally cripple emojis and optimize every post.
All of the above plugins perform much more than just enabling GZIP Compression on your WordPress websites. It is recommended to try them all and choose the most appropriate one for you. All of them are free and get updates frequently.
- Modifying .htaccess file to enable GZIP Compression
This technique is very technical, so it’s more appropriate for advanced users. Notwithstanding, anyone can do it as long as they are cautious. Before we proceed, recall that you ought to consistently back up your .htaccess record first if something turns out badly.
- You should download an FTP client, like Filezilla, to find the .htaccess document. It is generally positioned in the public_html directory of your website.
- Download the document and save a copy on your PC as a backup. At that point, insert the accompanying code before the # END WordPress line of .htaccess
- <IfModule mod_deflate.c>
- 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
- </IfModule>
- Transfer the edited document to the same location. Suppose FileZilla requests permission to overwrite it, click OK.
Presently, if you utilize the Check GZIP Compression tool again for results.
GZIP compression assists with decreasing the size of your pages and speeds up your site. Accordingly, visitors will have an extraordinary user experience and your site can rank well in SERP.
