Use Gzip on Shared Servers

Enable Gzip Compression

To enable Gzip compression on your site file types in a Shared Hosting plan:
Note: ASO Shared servers all have mod_deflate enabled, allowing for compression of your site content using Gzip encoding.

1. Log in to cPanel and click Optimize Website in the Software/Services section.

2. Specify if you want to compress all content or certain MIME types.

Possible MIME types include:
text/html, text/plain, text/xml, text/css, text/javascript, application/javascript, application/xhtml+xml,
application/xml, application/rss+xml, application/atom_xml, application/x-javascript, application/x-httpd-php, application/x-httpd-fastphp, application/x-httpd-eruby, and image/svg+xml.

This will basically create a .htaccess file in '/home/yourusername/.htaccess' with the following:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutPutFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml
<IfModule mod_setenvif.c>

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
# BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html

# NOTE: Due to a bug in mod_setenvif up to Apache 2.0.48
the above regex won't work. You can use the following
# workaround to get the desired effect:
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip don't-vary
</IfModule>

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!don't-vary
</IfModule>

</IfModule>

Verify Your Compression

Once you've configured your server, check to make sure you're actually serving up compressed content:

• In your browser

  • Use Web Developer Toolbar > Information > View Document Size to see whether the page is compressed.

• View the headers

  • Use Live HTTP Headers to examine the response, looking for a line that says 'Content-encoding: gzip.'

Most images, music, and videos are already compressed, so don't compress these formats again. You should only need to compress HTML, CSS, and Javascript.