website gzip compression – making your site faster for google site performance and seo

The latest google changes suggest it’s really important for a webmaster that their site is fast to perform in SEO after Q1. As such I’ve been cranking on a few things I outlined in my previous note. Here are my site speed results. Yay it’s getting faster!

Firstly removing the yahoo includes gained me about 50% (and didn’t lose me any of my non existent delicious traffic). This gained the site almost a full quartile in terms of site speed.

Secondly I decided to get to work on the gzip compression they called out since I thought my site already had gzip compression it was a surprise to me that this was an issue.

Gzip compression is a best practice for speeding up your site according to pretty much everyone out there. It sounds hard but is actually stupidly easy and around 90% of web traffic accepts gzip today (according to yahoo).

If the header request contains:

Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate

Then Gzip is supported. In apache you just have to turn on mod_gzip for Apache 1.3 whereas Apache 2.x is mod_deflate

Anyway it all becomes a lot easier if you have cpanel installed on your hosting since it short cuts having to do the sysadmin changes yourself. Under cpanel find the following section

Click on optimize website then select optimize all content.

 

This works perfectly on a small orange and other hosts who give you cpanel.

To check if gzip is working here is the header my site sent before I turned it on:

And here it is after:

You can see in the second header from the site it contains the line “Content-Encoding: gzip” which makes clear gzip is on.

Good luck making your site faster. I’ll keep you up to speed on my results.

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