How to Enable Gzip Compression on Your Nginx Website

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to enable gzip compression on your Nginx server. This works on any website (including WordPress) that runs on Nginx.

Why Enable Gzip Compression on Nginx?

For those of you who don’t know, gzip compression allows your website to load faster.

Understand that a huge portion of the time it takes a web page to load is due to network latency. By compressing your web pages and assets like images, CSS, and JavaScript, your server needs to send less data across the internet. In turn, your users need to download less information each time they request a page. This means that pages will be loaded faster.

On a good day, if your web page is 4 MB, gzip compression will reduced the size of your web page to 2 MB. This can improve page load times by a significant amount.

Note that the client web browser must perform an additional decompression step before rendering the web page, but most times the network time savings outweigh the overhead.

A lot of times, when running a test on PageSpeed Insights, Google suggests to “Enable text compression”. Similarly, they explain:

Text-based resources should be served with compression to minimize total network bytes.

By enabling Gzip compression, you can fix this PageSpeed Insights error on WordPress and non-WordPress websites alike.

Enable Gzip Compression in Nginx

To enable Gzip compression in Nginx, you will need root access to your server. On your server you want to edit the /etc/nginx/nginx.conf file and add the following.

gzip on;
gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.(?!.*SV1)";
gzip_vary on;
gzip_types text/plain text/css text/javascript image/svg+xml image/x-icon application/javascript application/x-javascript;

Please note that while probably all modern browsers support gzip compression, the gzip_disable line disables gzip compression for certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer.

After making changes, restart your Nginx server with the systemctl restart nginx command.

Verify It’s Working

You can verify that gzip compression is working with Chrome DevTools. In Google Chrome, go to View -> Developer -> Developer Tools. Open the Network tab and load a page from your website.

Click on one of your text-based assets like a JavaScript file and you should see a value of gzip for content-encoding under the Response Headers section.

Did you know another way to speed up your web pages it to serve your images in wepb format on Nginx?

If you have any questions about gzip on Nginx, let me know in the comments below.