How do I enable gzip compression? | Help Desk | Yakezie Forums

I've been making a concerted effort to clean up my food blog. I've cut down my validation errors from 96 to 25 and most of them are plugin related. Now I'm slogging through my PageSpeed results. Got my score up from 58 to 74. W3 Total Cache has been one big headache for me; even with it installed and set up according to the instructions, I was still getting low PageSpeed scores and the same recommendations. So I've uninstalled it and doing everything by hand. The part I'm working on now is enabling gzip encoding.

Does anybody have any clue to do this? I know it is done via the .htaccess file, but I haven't figured out just how. Everything I've tried hasn't worked.

Yikes. Thanks for the heads up. It was fine the last time I had checked. I'm not even sure what that custom CSS file is. I hadn't uninstalled W3TC on that site, because If You Can Read, You Can Cook was the larger priority in terms of how bad things were. I guess I know what I'm doing with my holiday!

Could you recommend a good free theme or provide a good, concise reason why I should take money out of my debt-paying budget to buy a premium theme?

Hostgator typically enables gzip compression on all their shared servers – according to this checker (link), it's enabled for all of your sites already. PageSpeed is notorious for telling you to do things that aren't necessary or are already done.

Good to know about PageSpeed. I know I don't seem to get the same score in any two tests. This morning, it's reporting back to 53! Could the variation be caused by differences in just how laggy HostGator is being at the time? I can well imagine that the sites on the same server are getting much more traffic on a Monday morning than on a Sunday afternoon.

On that note, my HostGator plan is due for renewal next month. I've already decided to jump ship. While I was looking around, I noticed that your Deluxe hosting plan is actually cheaper than HostGator's baby plan, although I would be right at the domain limit and if I ever get around to getting a separate domain for the taco seasoning or the niche site I've been procrastinating on finishing for 3 years now, I'd have to upgrade. So, how much time do I need to give myself before the end of my contract to make the switch?

Aside from EdwardAntrobus and If You Can Read You Cook, I don't think the rest of my sites combined have had 20k pageviews total, let alone per month. :) I have to talk to my brother who has one of the domains on the account, but I expect to go ahead and make the move on the 15th, so things will be ready for my to cut HG by the next weekend before the renewal date of the 24th.