Apache mod_deflate - real world improvements?

Well a good post again. I have been using this on my multiple WordPress installations as part of SEO to speed up my blogs for more than 2 years now. mod_deflate is similar to gzip compression but faster than that.

Search Engines always love to rank websites higher which have faster page load times and this is achieved by compressing the content of your website and allowing it to be fetched faster than the normal time it takes. mod_deflate helps in the same and does improve the speed of the website which can be checked through Yahoo Page Speed Test or even Firebug which has an addon for the same.

Code I have been using for a while which might be useful for members here

# BEGIN Deflate
< ifmodule mod_deflate.c >
< filesmatch "\.(js|css|png|jpg|gif|jpeg|htm|html|php)" >
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
< /filesmatch >
< /ifmodule >
# END Deflate

Thanks a lot, #-Link-Snipped-# . Did you notice any jump in the page spee test rankings after enabling this? I'm curious to know what are the compression sizes I can expect and is there any signifiant loss of quality of the images?

#-Link-Snipped-# Sorry for the late reply but there isn't much loss of the image quality. I would say your page will load much faster than it used to be. GTMetrix is the site where I check my ranking and there is a greater ranking after I add this in my .htaccess file which is 100% true. A most of the time and in rare cases B is the rating I get.

Thank you, Harish. I can definitely test this. I'm only concerned about the extra load it would add on the processor because Apache will have to process each and every request made to it and add an extra layer of compression. Did you see any noticeable spike in the load after enabling it? If yes, which file extensions do you think are most processor intensive?

To be frank I didn't actually do so much experimentation into it. But as I said there was good improvement though.

Harish KotraTo be frank I didn't actually do so much experimentation into it. But as I said there was good improvement though.

Have began using it and the difference is small but still noticeable. Looks like it won't do much harm. Thank you for your inputs, Harish.

No problem 😀 I just told what I knew and learnt 😀