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.
74%? good god!
be sure to post after a month or so if see drastic improvements. :)
improvements in bandwidth savings I mean…