Learn/Compression-Can-Speed-Up-Your-Site

What Is Compression?

Website compression -- more specifically known as HTTP compression, gzip compression, mod_gzip, or mod_deflate -- is a way to compress the raw textual data that makes up your website (like HTML, CSS and javascript) into a smaller package that is easier to work with.

Compression essentially means that rather than sending all of the raw data for a website "over the wire" via the web server, you're just sending a much smaller, compressed file with all the information in it. Then the web browser will open and expand that to the full information.

Here's one way to think of compression: Say you want someone across the country to have a bucket full of water. You could mail them a bucket full of water, but that could be expensive because of how heavy it is. Or you could just mail them a bucket and they could fill it with water themselves.

How Compression Can Help Your Site

What it comes down to is that compression can help speed up the time it takes for someone to load your website's pages. This can mean a better experience for your customers and the people using your website. Compression can also make it easier for search engines to crawl your site - they don't like really slow websites.

It's best to have a compressed website, but if you don't it won't usually be a problem (unless you have a site that's doing a lot of crazy stuff).

Is Your Website Compressed?

Where you can check if you're compressing: http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/

How To Get Your Website Compressed

Check with your hosting company and ask about getting your website compressed or gzipped. It may be an easy/free change for them to make for you.

All popular webservers such as Apache and IIS can be configured to automatically compress your website's content before sending it "over the wire"

When someone hits your site the first thing is the webserver ... and then request the content.