Compression

[TravG]

I do not really know a lot about compression, but when I run my site through seo checkers this is one thing that always comes up as I need to improve. I do not know a lot about compression and just quickly what I have read about it seems it may be a little bit of a task to do.

Is compression really something worth doing? Is it worth taking the time to learn and implement or is it not that big of a deal?

Thanks

[DaftDog]

If you're using cPanel you can activate the mod_deflate option. It's as simple as that.

[thebookiesoffers]

never heard of it

[DaftDog]

It's easy peasy, see here: http://windhosting.net/portal/knowle...nel-Sites.html

[Sergej_AGR]

You can easily do deflate or gzip compression on apache servers via htaccess with the following mods.

for example deflate by filetype

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom_xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-shockwave-flash
</IfModule>

or gzip compression

<IfModule mod_gzip.c>
mod_gzip_on Yes
mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</IfModule>

If you need other extensions or filetypes you can also add them this way

[baldidiot]

You're probably not, but if you're using joomla just select the 'Gzip Page Compression' in Control Panel > Server

[TravG]

And exactly what does this do? Save resources? Just curious what the benefits of this are?

[universal4]

It adds overhead to the server to do the compression and uncompression in an effort to make downloading the code faster.

I have always been of the impression that if you need to compress something because it is too big to download, or you want to make it smaller to download faster then you should....

....make it smaller and it will download faster....

If you are using those 100k 120k or larger images from the programs, chop some frames out or ask them to reduce their weight or pick other creatives.

If your pages suffer code bloat, see what you can do to reduce it such as more css.

If your site still seems slow and you are using wordpress, see how much faster it is if you disable plugins and if a plugin is causing the slow downs, find another one that does the same thing faster or see if there is a way to do what is needed without a plugin.

Rick
Universal4

[Nick.RevenueJet]

From what I know, compression means cutting all the useless spaces in a code. The only affiliate site that I know is using compression is this one.
Because googlebot and browsers don't need spaces to properly read html, it makes sense to cut down those spaces, as obviously the page will load faster if it weighs less.

[slotplayer]

And exactly what does this do? Save resources? Just curious what the benefits of this are?

the less trips to server(s) to render the page the faster it will load, especially on mobile devices.
if the page loads faster it will reduce bounce rate, less bounce rate can result in better conversions/sales.

Run your pages through Google Page Speed to see any bottlenecks.

[TravG]

Ok - thanks everyone. I guess I will go ahead and do this since it is so easy to do. The faster the better!

[TravG]

Hey I did this for my images file/folder and wow, I think I can really tell a difference just for that. I have many large images that I new took up a lot of resources and slowed things down but I hated to sacrifice the quality of the images.

Does it make sense by just compressing all of my images that you could see a diffrence in speed or is it just my imagination?

[DaftDog]

Images files like JPEG's and GIF's are already compressed and cannot be further compressed.

[rak]

Images files like JPEG's and GIF's are already compressed and cannot be further compressed.

jpegs can be further compressed. By further compressing them, the quality degrades.

gifs from memory have different compression methods for you to choose from.

[DaftDog]

jpegs can be further compressed. By further compressing them, the quality degrades.

gifs from memory have different compression methods for you to choose from.

I stand corrected.

I was always under the impression that once an image file was created it couldn't be further compressed in a compression file. Maybe I misunderstood that further compression would result in image degradation and should be avoided if you want to maintain image quality.

[slotplayer]

28K in size before compression



10K in size with 15% compression

[Sergej_AGR]

"Light Image Resizer" is a great tool to compress or change images. You can set up quality in %, height, width, scale them if you change the format, output them in a different filetype and use it for bulk actions.

And it is free: http://www.obviousidea.com/windows-s...image-resizer/