2026 note: This post is from 2014. The Gzippy plugin has since been removed from the WordPress repository or is no longer maintained. Modern alternatives are listed at the bottom of the post.
Is your WordPress site getting sluggish? In 2014 the Gzippy plugin compressed your HTML/CSS/JS to shrink page weight and speed up rendering — also a small win for Google’s crawl/index cycle.
2026 Approach — Server-Side First
Today compression belongs at the server layer:
- Brotli + gzip on Apache/Nginx. Most modern hosts enable this by default — cPanel → Optimize Website also flips it on.
- Cloudflare in front of the origin gives you Brotli plus Auto Minify.
- Compression + cache combo: WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache, or WP Rocket (paid).
- For images: ShortPixel or Imagify.
Verification
Confirm compression is active with PageSpeed Insights or by inspecting headers: curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,br".
