How to use Gzip Page Compression in Joomla 3.1

Within Joomla 3.0’s server settings is an option labeled Gzip Page Compression. What this feature does is allow your server to compress files before sending them to the user. This means that the user has to downloaded less content because it is compressed, and thus in theory pages should load faster for your users.

To enable Gzip Page Compression in Joomla 3.0

By default, GZip Page Compressions is disabled in Joomla 3.0. You can follow these settings to turn it on:

  1. Log into your Joomla 3.0 dashboard
  2. In the left menu, click the Global Configuration link
  3. Within the tabs listed at the top of the page, click Server
  4. Under Server Settings and next to Gzip Page Compression, click Yes. Then click Save in the top left menu.

    You can use this page to test if your pages are being sent to the user in a compressed format.

    When not compressedWhen compressed using gzip
    not-gzipped

    gzipped

    You can see that the original size of the page was 9.68KB, and when compressed the page was only 3.63KB. This is a data savings of 62.5%!

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