Amit wrote about how to enable gzip compression on sites using PHP, and since almost all of my sites use PHP it was a perfect match. A few months ago I turned on mod_gzip in Apache but I ran into some snags and eventually turned it off.
All I had to do for this solution was add the following line to .htaccess.
php_value output_handler ob_gzhandler
The handy gzip compression test says I got the following bandwidth savings:
| Site |
Size before |
Size after |
Bandwidth savings |
| This site |
40.7KB |
10.6KB |
74% |
| Coin collecting blog |
20.1KB |
6.9KB |
66% |
| Hersam family site |
5.7KB |
2.6KB |
55% |
The sites feel zippier too.
