I am currently using Media Temple to host my blog and have found them to be a good hosting provider so far.
If you are like me then you will want your websites to load super fast to provide a great user experience and to take advantage of the SEO benefits of having a fast loading website.
One of the best methods you can use to optimize your websites load time is Gzip Compression. It effectively reduces the size of everything that is being passed between your web server and your websites visitor, this enables them to download your site a lot faster due to it being considerably smaller.
The problem here is that Media Temple do not have Gzip Compression enabled on their Grid Service, however there is an alternative… Deflate compression. This method does exactly the same job and can be used on Media Temple.
To enable compression, simply add the following to your websites .htaccess file:
# Compresses Text, HTML, Javascript, CSS & XML:
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript
Once you have added the above and uploaded the file back to your server you will need to check that it is working correctly, I recommend using:
http://www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php
It is a free tool that will allow you to check if compression is working on your website, what type of compression is being used and more importantly how much are your pages being compressed.
When I added this to my .htaccess file for this blog I achieved a compression of over 75%.
What is your compression score?
David Shaw is a Freelance Internet Professional and Web Analyst from Bristol, UK.Working for clients around the world he specializes in Website Analysis, Search Engine Optimization, Conversion Rate Optimization and User Experience Analysis.He has generated millions for companies around the world through A/B testing and website optimization to increase conversion rates and revenue.
Hey David! Very cool article! Thank you for that. I’m sure this article will prove helpful to a lot of people. I did just want to make you aware though that the reason mod_gzip is not enabled on our (gs) Grid-Service is because we’ve replaced it with a much better method mod_deflate. More information on that can be found in the following KnowledgeBase article: http://mdtm.pl/TxfvbB
If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us. We’re available on phone, chat or Twitter 24/7.
Drew J
(mt) MediaTemple
@MediaTemple