How to make gzip work on 1and1 shared host WordPress site

Question

YSlow is telling me that my css should be compressed, but after several hours of tinkering, I cannot for the life of me get gzip to work for my website. At this point, I'm not even sure if the performance increase (will there be one?) will be worth the effort. I'm running a WordPress site on a 1&1 shared hosting account. Honestly, I don't really know what I'm doing with this stuff, and can't seem to get an appropriate setup. I read in a few places that with 1&1, "modules Apache mod_deflate and mod_gzip are not installed.", so I assume this is part of the problem. I have tried the following code: This one doesn't seem to do anything: ``` mod_gzip_on Yes mod_gzip_dechunk Yes mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$ mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$ mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text\.* mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.* mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image\.* mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*

Accepted Answer

So, after a while I figured out how to compress html, css and js files having a 1&1 Webhosting package. Deflate is not supported! For the dynamic content you add php.ini to your root directory of your website. Content of php.ini: ``` zlib.output_compression =1 zlib.output_compression_level =9 ``` Of course you can also choose another compression level, 9 is the highest (and causing the highest server load). That will compress your the dynamically generated html file. To compress static files (css, js and images...) you need to modify the .htaccess file. For that append ``` RewriteEngine on RewriteBase / RewriteOptions Inherit ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} (gzip.*) ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !.+\.gz$ RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f RewriteRule (.+) $1.gz [QSA,L] ``` to your .htaccess file (you find that file in the root directory of your website - else create it). But the compression is not done automatically. So you have to compress the files on your own! Use e.g. 7-zip and compress the js and css files with .gz -> the result should be e.g. stylesheet.css.gz. Then upload the file to the same directory as the file you just compressed. Now it should work! PS: compression is not always useful especially when the file is very small. So check the differences before and after compression.

How to make gzip work on 1and1 shared host WordPress site

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