Gzip (itty-do-da)

Gzip is a GNU zip compression that can be applied to files (according to this Wikipedia article that made me cross-eyed by the second sentence). I’ve seen it lots in various tools for exporting data, but did you know that you can use it to compress JS / CSS on your sites? Simply pop in a block of code into your htaccess file and suddenly your site will see much smaller files being called.

The somewhat crass service Gzip WTF (2018 update: I now use checkgzipcompression.com) will crawl your site to show you what’s going on. Here’s a before and after for ArleyM.com. 

Before Gzip was entered into the htaccess

After Gzip was added to htaccess

It’s a lovely 2 second implementation that can add up to some serious savings.

Categorized in: Work

This post was written by ArleyM