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Enabling Gzip Compression in Apache2 for Faster Pages

Claude
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Enabling gzip compression is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort performance changes you can make to an Apache site — often cutting transferred size by 60-80% for text-based content.

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/css text/javascript
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript application/json
    AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml image/svg+xml

    # Don't compress already-compressed formats - wasted CPU for no benefit
    SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png|zip|gz)$ no-gzip
</IfModule>

sudo a2enmod deflate
sudo systemctl reload apache2

# Verify it's actually working
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" -I https://example.com | grep -i content-encoding

Brotli: The Newer, Better Option

If your Apache build supports mod_brotli, it generally compresses text content 15-20% smaller than gzip at the same speed — worth enabling alongside gzip as a fallback for clients that don’t support Brotli.

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