The benefit of using deflate over gzip is that deflate works automatically with Apache servers while gzip has to be installed first.
To use it, delete the code you added above and replace it with this: AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plainĪddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xmlĪddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xmlĪddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xmlĪddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascriptĪddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript However, new Apache servers now use a method called deflate. The above method used work with Apache webservers. Then save your file and refresh your page. Mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding.*gzip.* Mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.* Mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$ htaccess file to enable GZIP compression: Otherwise, you can use your file manager for this.Īdd this code to your. If you’ve got WordPress, you can use a plugin to edit this file. htaccessįor most people, enabling compression means adding code to their. Here, we’ll go over the most common ways of enabling compression for various servers. How you enable compression on your server depends on your server. Web users don’t like waiting for pages to load (as we’ve discussed), so Google isn’t really interested in recommending slow pages to their users.Īs such, how quickly Google is able to connect to your site and access content and information to a user has a direct impact on rankings. Why Does Compression Matter in SEO?Ĭompression matters for SEO because speed matters in SEO. So you don’t have to worry about any users being unable to properly load any files. Except for one.Īll modern browsers are able to automatically receive and handle files compressed using the gzip format. There are lots of different formats for compression files, but not all browsers will necessarily support a given format. When a file is uncompressed, those unique identifiers are replaced with the original data. On a technical level, compression works by scanning a file, finding repetitive data and replacing duplicates with a unique identifier that takes up less space than the original data. The users’ browsers are able to download, unpack and display these files quickly.Ĭompression is the process by which files on a server are encoded to take up less space, making them easier and faster to send. These zipped files are much smaller in size than the normal version, so transfer takes much, much less time. This is accomplished by enabling compression on your server and sending zipped versions of files to users’ browsers. Where you run into problems is when the size of your page - with all of its images, CSS, JavaScript and other files - starts to get so big it slows down that third step.įortunately, there’s a way you can configure files on your server that can reduce their sizes by up to 90%, which means it takes less time for a browser to start showing the page to a user. Since web users are impatient, reducing the time each step takes will help you realize major benefits in your user experience and SEO performance. Your browser downloads the page and displays it on your screen.The server finds the page and sends it to your browser.Your browser sends a request to the site’s server.When you try to load a web page, there are a few steps that have to take place: