Enable HTTP (gzip) compression w3 total cache

B

Brooke Lustig

New Member
Hello everyone,

I have a wordpress site that I just tested with different page speed tools and it turns out we haven't enabled HTTP (gzip) compression even though the box is ticked in on the w3 total cache plugin. Being completely green with all this I'm wondering if there is something I need to do on the hosting side (cpanel) to be able to use this feature? My hosting is the Managed SSD-2 VPS package.
 
Brooke Lustig said:
Hello everyone,

I have a wordpress site that I just tested with different page speed tools and it turns out we haven't enabled HTTP (gzip) compression even though the box is ticked in on the w3 total cache plugin. Being completely green with all this I'm wondering if there is something I need to do on the hosting side (cpanel) to be able to use this feature? My hosting is the Managed SSD-2 VPS package.
Click to expand...

You'll want to use Easy Apache ( https://wiki.knownhost.com/control-panels/cpanel-whm/what-is-easyapache-and-how-do-i-use-it ) and make sure that mod_deflate is enabled. Of course you can always open a ticket with our Support Department and we can get it enabled for you.
 
Hi David, thanks for the quick response, is there any cons of enabling it? I have a membership site on wordpress and my goal is just to enable gzip compression to speed the site up a bit. Would you recommend enabling it?

Thank you again.
 
Brooke Lustig said:
Hi David, thanks for the quick response, is there any cons of enabling it? I have a membership site on wordpress and my goal is just to enable gzip compression to speed the site up a bit. Would you recommend enabling it?

Thank you again.
Click to expand...

I'd definitely recommend enabling it from my personal experiences. I'm not aware of any cons of enabling it. This link may give more insight: http://www.webperformance.com/library/reports/moddeflate/
 
W3TC uses ob_start('ob_gzhandler') to enable GZip in PHP-based output, which is the wrong way to do it. (W3TC does a lot of things wrong, but that's a different topic. ;) )

If you add something like the following in the .htaccess file for your WordPress site:

Code: 
  <IfModule deflate_module>
     <filesMatch "\.(js|css|html|php)$">
       SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
     </filesMatch>
   </IfModule>
GZip will be used for all relevant files if mod_deflate was built into Apache. Note that you should disable GZip in W3TC if you add the above to your .htaccess file.
 
Thanks for the input everyone, looks like I'm going to ask support to enable it, just scared of breaking the site/hosting set up I suppose. Thanks again for the advice!
 
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