The State
Text-based resources should be served with compression to minimize total network bytes. The Opportunities section of your Lighthouse report lists all text-based resources that aren’t compressed:
Lighthouse gathers all responses that:
content-encoding header set to br, gzip, or deflate.Lighthouse then compresses each of these with GZIP to compute the potential savings.
If the original size of a response is less than 1.4KB, or if the potential compression savings is less than 10% of the original size, then Lighthouse does not flag that response in the results.
The potential savings that Lighthouse lists are the potential savings when the response is encoded with GZIP. If Brotli is used, even more savings are possible.
Enable text compression on the server(s) that served these responses in order to pass this audit.
Configure your server to compress the response with Brotli, if the browser supports it. Brotli is a newer compression format, but it’s not universally supported in browsers. Do a search for “how to enable Brotli compression in <server>” to learn how to implement it, where <server> is the name of your server.
Use GZIP as a fallback to Brotli. GZIP is universally supported in all modern browsers, but is less efficient than Brotli. See Server Configs for examples.
To check if a server compressed a response:
Control+Shift+J (or Command+Option+J on Mac) to open DevTools.content-encoding header in the Response Headers section.content-encoding response header.To compare the compressed and de-compressed sizes of a response:
Control+Shift+J (or Command+Option+J on Mac) to open DevTools.[amazon box=”B084LF85PC” “small”]