Impact of gzip compression in Magento 2 Speed Optimization

When you audit your Magento 2 site in GT metrix or any other speed optimization audit tool, you can see a warning enabling text compression. Are you not aware about compression in Magento 2? Don’t worry…….In this blog you can learn about what is Gzip compression, how to enable gzip compression in Magento 2? How is it useful for your store? How it will impact on site speed. Let’s see the blog in detail.

To respond to visitor requests on browsers, servers have to download the requested files. If files size is too big then it will take more time to respond to users. Big size file creates more http requests and slows down the website.

Gzip compression is a very helpful method of file compression that allows your web server to provide your website users with smaller file sizes which load faster.It compresses your webpages and style sheets before sending them over to the browser. This drastically reduces transfer time since the files are much smaller. Usually, compression of your HTML and CSS files with gzip saves between fifty and seventy percent of the file size. This implies that loading the pages takes less time, and less bandwidth is used overall. File compression saves a lot of bandwidth and network transfer speed.

Gzip is capable of compressing and decompressing files very quickly by using a data compression algorithm. Gzip can compress almost any file type, from plain text to pictures , and is fast enough to compress and decompress data.

Content or file compression is also very critical. Currently, there are three best and popular compression modules available :

• Gzip
• mod_deflate
• Brotli

All of these modules are quite good. As gzip is quite popular. File compression saves a lot of bandwidth and network transfer speed.

As stated by GTmetrix, Gzip compression reduces the size of pages and style sheets by 70%. So you should have a first priority to enable Gzip compression for your Magento 2 store. As we see Magento 2 is a very popular framework and competitors offer a smooth user experience. Speed directly impacted the sale. So as a storeowner don’t skip any chance to speed up your website. Many tips & techniques are available so using that you have to speed up your Magento 2 site. You can refer our article on Tools & Techniques to speedup website

GZIP provides a good enough compression ratio between 2.5 and 3 for text and it is fast, it is fast to compress data and it is fast to deCOMpress it. As we usually can figure out compress responses on the fly, this is something to take into account.

Generally we see in the HTML or CSS files contain a lot of repeated text and white spaces due to that files size becoming large. If these files are larger in size, a higher load time will result. The bigger the file, the longer it takes the visitor to show the result. By enabling gzip compression, the files are compressed before submitting them to the browser, resulting in reducing the load time.So that it is useful to reduce the time it takes for a website to download page files and style sheets, which eventually reduces your website’s load time.

If we could send a .zip file to the browser, we’d save on bandwidth and download time. The browser could download the zipped file, extract it, and then show it to the user, If the page loads quickly then user will be very happy.

Gzip is used to reduce the total amount of data transferred to customers. When a browser with gzip support sends a request, it adds “gzip” to its Accept-Encoding header. When the web server receives the request, it generates the response as normal, then checks the Accept-Encoding header to determine how to encode the response. If the server supports gzip, it uses gzip to compress each resource. It then delivers the compressed copies of each resource with an added Content-Encoding header, specifying that the resource is encoded using gzip. The browser then decompresses the content into its original uncompressed version before rendering it to the user.

The main reason it is important is because it reduces the time it takes for a website to transfer the page files and style sheets which ultimately reduces the load time of your website. Gzip Compression transfers files faster than non-compressed files. However, there’s a significant misconception regarding its actual impact on server performance.

While GZIP minimizes the transfer rate duration, it’s impact on server performance and CPU is really greater than uncompressed files. While this is often a consideration if you’ve got an old, outdated web server, modern servers are quite capable of handling this increase. This is the reason many webmasters discuss GZIP as a performance-enhancing tool is that while it’s going to not enhance the server-side performance, by transferring files quickly and allowing end-user browsers to render on-page content faster than before, it enhances perceived performance. Ultimately, this is often what matters.

• Reduces the file size and download data fast
• Help to speed the website
• Helps to improve SEO

There are different methods of setting up gzip compression depending on whether or not you’ve got an IIS or Apache server

For Apache servers

Copy and paste the following code into your .htaccess file:

By enabling gzip compression you can reduce the file size and it helps to improve in load time. As explained above, gzip compression is a very easy method which can help you to increase the website speed by reducing the file size, it’s helpful to faster loading pages. If any queries related to this blog or need assistance related to any service feel free to Contact Us.