GZIP is a file format and a software application used for file compression and decompression. GZIP compression is enabled server-side, and allows for further reduction in the size of your HTML, stylesheets, and JavaScript files. It will not work on images as these are already compressed in a different way. Some have seen up to 70% reductions due to compression. It is probably one of the easiest optimizations you could make when it comes to WordPress.
If you don’t have GZIP compression enabled, there are a couple ways you can go about enabling it on your webserver.
Enable GZIP with WordPress Plugin
The first and one of the easiest is by using a caching plugin that supports enabling GZIP. WP Rocket for example adds GZIP compression rules in your .htaccess file automatically using the mod_deflate module. W3 Total Cache also has a way to enable this for you under it’s performance section. Even though these are plugins, this still relies on permissions to modify files on your webserver. If your caching plugin doesn’t have permission, you will need to ask your host or use a snippet of code below.
Enable GZIP on Apache
The second way to enable Gzip compression is by editing your .htaccess file. Most shared hosts use Apache, in which you can simply add the code below to your .htaccess file. You can find your .htaccess file at the root of your WordPress site via FTP.
Important: Make sure mod_filter
is loaded on your server, otherwise the AddOutputFilterByType
directive will not work and could cause a 500 error. We recommend checking your error logs if you have any issues with the code below.
<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
# Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
Header append Vary User-Agent
</IfModule>
Ensure that you add it below the current contents of your .htaccess file. Example below:

Example of GZIP Apache .htaccess code
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