Enabling gzip compression on your script / webserver will not only help you achieving a greater score on Google PageSpeed “Enable compression” [1] test, but also allow a faster rendering time on your visitors browser.

The easiest way to achieve it, providing your are using PHP, is to add a few lines at the beginning of your PHP script to activate zlib output compression [2] :

ini_set("zlib.output_compression", "On");
ini_set("zlib.output_compression_level", "-1");

A good way to check if it works, is to perform a before / after test on gidnetwork (Fig 1) [3] for example.

You can also add the following piece in your htaccess file, which will tell Apache to compress the corresponding files, providing the mod_deflate is activated on your server :

#Compression
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/text text/html text/plain text/xml 
	text/css text/javascript application/javascript
</IfModule>

For more details on Apache compression, please see the great articles about this subject on betterexplained.com [4] or www.cloudtech.ch [5].

For example, this allowed me to pass the Google PageSpeed [6] test Enable Compression [1] on a website, going up from a score of 72 on mobile (Fig 2) to 89 (Fig 3), and up from 79 (Fig 4) to 89 on desktop (Fig 5).