This plugin for WP rocks!!

I was looking for a way to make my blog load a bit faster and found this tiny plugin

Code:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-http-compression/

What this thing does is it allows your WordPress blog to output pages compressed in gzip format if a browser supports compression.

Check out these stats of my homepage:

Before plugin: Page size (uncompressed): 26,454 bytes

After plugin: Download size (compressed): 4,806 bytes

Bandwidth saved by compression: 81.8%!!!


My blog now loads much faster and it uses less bandwidth. If you want to test your speed and see how much you are saving by using this plugin you can go to this site

Code:

http://ismyblogworking.com

Hope you like this!!

 

Can we get a list of supported browsers?

Like...

IE vXX
Firefox
Chrome...

That would be super helpful. I may just do it.

Also, would that interfere with the indexing of such blogs?

 

It works with any browser. Only very old ones can't handle it, but I don't think anyone uses these aymore

And the engines love it. If you have a google webmasters account there is even a suggestion box where google tells you that you should enable compression to speed up your sites.

 

Gzip compression is indeed one of the big things for site speed.

Some other things to look at are listed here:

http://developer.yahoo.com/performance/rules.html

Which can be evaluated really easily with yslow (http://developer.yahoo.com/yslow/) and google page speed (http://code.google.com/speed/page-speed/)

These tools also give suggestions to make it easier.

 

Ran blog through ismyblogworking site... said:

Code:

Your robots.txt file returned a 500 response. My blog is Broken

What does the the robots.txt file do? Anyone know?

 

You can just upload a blank robots.txt to your site. Or put this in it

Code:

User-agent: *
Disallow:

It just tells the engines that it is ok to check out your site

 

Yeah, I recently installed a gzip plugin on my blogs as well. But I'm using wp-compressor (hxxp://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpcompressor/) Works like a charm.

 

Inserted blank robots.txt file... Says site "working" Thanks nufaman!

 

Thanks for posting this tip. This isn't something that I normally think about, but will definitely look into it and experiment with compression plugins using different browsers.

Anyone know if page load speed has an impact on your rankings in Google? I am sure Google must factor this into their algo since page load speed is part of the user experience.

 

Yes, they do take it into consideration, they show you your speed stats in your google webmasters console

 

I've been trying this plugin-- http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/w3-total-cache/ -- out in order to speed up some of my sites. So far it's worked extremely well. It not only includes gzip, but it also has minify and the option for using a content delivery network. It's kind of a swiss army knife of optimization for wordpress.

 

Will try it. Sounds good. Anything to speed up the upload time considering Google may now give some weightage for this

 

CMIW :

it sure save your bandwith, but will take more on your server resource, cause everytime you page load, the server doing compressing process. if you have many page load simultaneously, it can really slow your server. the worst part is you get suspended.
just my 2 cent

 

I use WP Super Cache, fantastic cache plugin which also has a compression feature.

 

Just installed this... works like a charm.

First I loaded my blog, and counted 10 seconds for it to completely load.
Then I installed this pluggin.
Then, I loaded my blog again from another machine, and sure enough.. 4.5 or 5 seconds...

 

I second that! WP Super cache is sweet

 

Er....WP super cache compresses what it caches from your site. But wp-http-compression compresses the whole site right that is being downloaded right?? correct me if i am wrong but installing the two plugins may cause some resource but it should speed up the site load.

 

well i installed it, these are my stats:

• Page size (uncompressed): 137,013 bytes
• Download size (compressed): 16,941 bytes
• Bandwidth saved by compression: 87.6%

is that good?

 

w3 total cache with memcached set to compress and minify is much much better, ang nginx. this will provide much more then just compressed output.

 

this is why you need to use memcached and nginx