How to enable GZIP/HTTP compression on your site/wordpress

Not sure how I got it into my head today. Shower thought I guess. I wanted to see if I could compress my wordpress sites to see if I could get them to load faster. Gzip is the way.

Why GZIP? It can compress and save at least 50% and up to 80% of bandwidth. So if you have bandwidth limits on your hosting site it would be a good idea to enable it. ( I have unlimited bandwidth at namecheap)

Will my visitors notice that I am using GZIP? The compressing and unzipping only takes a fraction of a second and the end user will not notice. Most sites today are using GZIP.

I have a lot of photos on my site will GZIP help me? GZIP compression is not recommended for non-text files, such as graphical files and .zip files because it hardly saves space and can therefore increase the loading time.

How easy is it to setup? Super easy! All you have to do is edit your .htaccess file. and add a module and BOOM!

<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