On 9th May 2016, I added gZIP compression to for Images, CSS files and JavaScript files using some code added to this site's .htaccess file.

About a month later, I looked at the Crawls Stats on Google Search Console for this site and noticed that the Kilobytes of data downloaded per day seemed to have reduced in general by more than a half.

I left the Crawls Stats building up till today, 23rd June 2016, and the pattern of Kilobytes downloaded per day seems to have remained similar, in that download of data seems to be generally less than a half, and also after more new images and content being added to the site.

See the Crawl Stats chart below where the significant dip about a third of the way in the block between May 2016 and Jun 2016 is when the lines of code for gZip compression were added to the root .htaccess file.

So, if you want to try increasing the page loads of your site and your server supports gZIP compression, and especially if your sites uses a many or large sized images, css files and javascript files, then try adding the following lines of code to a .htaccess file on the root of your site.

## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##
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
## ENABLE GZIP COMPRESSION ##

If you host does not support gZip compression then I recommend SiteGround hosting.

If your are new to web hosting and perhaps require a managed service where I can help manage the technical aspects of the hosting which can often overwhelm beginners, then contact me here.

Google Search Console, Crawl Stats:

2016.06.23.crawl.stats.bandwidth