Gzip is GNU Zip, an open source (yay!) form of file compression that is used in order to reduce file size (archive – like zip) and also to allow for faster file transfer.
Most modern browsers can render Gzipped content easily – making the time spent receiving the files much reduced in setups which Gzip HTML, JS and CSS files by default.
Gzip can compress text based files really efficiently. Images less so, as files like JPG are already to a large degree compressed.
This is a question we are asked by people on a regular basis: “Why is my website slow?” The answer provided here, since 2012, is generally speaking in a WordPress context – because we are WP specialists – but a lot of the rules will apply to really any website, particularly one which runs on …
