In this tutorial, we will show you how to enable Gzip Compression on Nginx. For those of you who didn’t know, Nginx is one of the most popular web servers in the world and is responsible for hosting some of the largest and highest-traffic sites on the internet. It is more resource-friendly than Apache in most cases and can be used as a web server or a reverse proxy. So today I’m going to show you how to setup enable Gzip compression on Nginx on CentOS 6 or 7. Compressing your scripts and images is a good idea to optimize your website’s load times.
This article assumes you have at least basic knowledge of Linux, know how to use the shell, and most importantly, you host your site on your own VPS. The installation is quite simple and assumes you are running in the root account, if not you may need to add ‘sudo‘ to the commands to get root privileges. I will show you through the step-by-step enable Gzip Compression on Nginx.
Enable Gzip Compression on Nginx
Step 1. Configure Nginx Configuration.
Now we edit Nginx.conf (/etc/nginx/nginx.conf) :
nano /etc/nginx/nginx.conf
Add the following lines:
gzip on; gzip_http_version 1.0; gzip_comp_level 2; gzip_proxied any; gzip_min_length 1100; gzip_buffers 16 8k; gzip_types text/plain text/html text/css application/x-javascript text/xml application/xml application/xml+rss text/javascript; gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6].(?!.*SV1)"; gzip_vary on;
Step 2. Now, you simply need to restart your server.
service nginx restart
If you wish to test if GZIP is enabled, use this command:
curl -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip" -I http://idroot.us
With that file now in place, restart your server and you will now be serving site assets with gzip compression. Google takes site speed into account when ranking and placing your sites in their search engine so do your users a favor and strive for the fastest site possible, especially for mobile users.
Congratulations! You have successfully enabled Gzip on Nginx. Thanks for using this tutorial for enabling gzip compression Nginx on the Linux system. For additional help or useful information, we recommend you check the official Nginx website.