A short and sweet post today, following up yesterday’s discussion about making your Joomla site smaller and faster. Someone over at Digg recently pointed out that if Digg made one small change they could save thousands of dollars in hosting costs ever year.
That change is to send out webpages in a compressed format. When you get a Joomla component it is often contained in a zip file. This enables the file to be much smaller without damaging the content in any way. You can do the same thing with webpages. In Joomla you just need to click “Yes” in the following place:
Site => Global Configuration => Server => GZIP Page Compression => Yes
Theres also a great test to find out how much your site will benefit. According to WhatsMyIP.org, Alledia.com shrinks from 47k down to just 9k when GZip is enabled. Some major sites are compressed such as YouTube.com, MySpace.com, CNN.com and Bebo.com. Others have still not made the leap:
These are the 20 most popular sites worldwide, according the Alexa.com. Only four of the twenty don’t use GZip and three are owned by Microsoft:
- Yahoo.com – Yes
- MSN.com – No
- YouTube.com – Yes
- Baidu.com – Yes
- MySpace.com – Yes
- Live.com – No
- Orkut.com – Yes
- QQ.com – Yes
- Yahoo.co.jp – No
- Wikipedia.org – Yes
- Sina.com.cn – Yes
- EBay.com – Yes
- Microsoft.com – No
- Blogger.com – Yes
- Megaupload.com – Yes
- Sohu.com – Yes
- 163.com – Yes
- Google.co.uk – Yes
- Hi5.com – Yes