Compression is an easy way to cut your hosting bills if you pay for bandwidth. It can also reduce page download times for your readers, which is always a good thing (and benefits you in terms of Google‘s latest algorithm, which takes such things into account). To implement GZIP compression login to your host account’s cPanel, choose the Optimize Website option under Software/Services and set all content for compression. More details here.

I’ve known this was an option for a long time, but was using a caching plugin for WordPress and had mistakenly assumed that the two were not compatible. However, I enabled GZIP because of the GTMetrix site speed test repeated recommendation to do so and notice a quite significant difference.

Without compression, a typical page takes about 3 seconds to load 240 kilobytes of data, making 29 requests. With GZIP enabled across all content MIME types, the time is just over 1 second to download 166kb of data (same number of requests). My Google Page Speed grade went from 89% to 96% (Yahoo’s YSlow grade was 77% now 81%).

If you’re running a blog on an Apache server and have access to your cPanel, you should take a look and run some tests. Your mileage may vary. You can check whether compression is working properly using this page.