Response Compression

What is this?

HTTP compression compresses your server's responses before sending them over the wire. The browser decompresses them automatically. A 200KB HTML file compresses to ~40KB with gzip, and ~30KB with Brotli - making your pages 5-6x faster to transfer.

Your server indicates compression with the Content-Encoding header:

Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Encoding: br

Why it matters

• 60-80% reduction in transfer size - free performance improvement with no code changes
• Faster page loads on all connections - especially important for mobile users on slower connections
• Lower bandwidth costs if you're paying for egress
• Better Core Web Vitals scores → better SEO rankings

How to fix it

How to enable depends on your server:

Providers & tools

gzip on;
gzip_types text/plain text/css application/json
  application/javascript text/xml application/xml;
gzip_min_length 1000;

const compression = require('compression');
app.use(compression());

from starlette.middleware.gzip import GZipMiddleware
app.add_middleware(GZipMiddleware, minimum_size=1000)