How to optimize your site using Gzip compression on the Nginx server

2019-10-05 System SEO @JS

My test platform: CentOS Linux release 7.6.1810 (Core)

Requirements: user with root privileges or non-root user with sudo privileges.

Edit the configuration file /etc/nginx/nginx.conf and add as shown below:

server {
    [...]
    gzip on;
    gzip_vary on;
    gzip_min_length 10240;
    gzip_proxied expired no-cache no-store private auth;
    gzip_types text/plain text/css text/xml text/javascript application/x-javascript application/xml;
    gzip_disable "MSIE [1-6]\.";
    ...
}

Explanation for the configuration:

gzip on - enables gzip compression,
gzip_vary on - tells proxies to cache both gzipped and regular versions of a resource,
gzip_min_length 1024 - informs Nginx to not compress anything smaller than the defined size,
gzip_proxied - compress data even for clients that are connecting via proxies,
gzip_types - enables the types of files that can be compressed,
gzip_disable “MSIE [1-6]."; - disable compression for Internet Explorer versions 1-6.

Save the file, and then restart the Nginx service for the changes to take effect:

$ sudo nginx -t
$ sudo systemctl restart nginx.service
$ systemctl status nginx.service

GZIP compression improves page loading speed and SEO test results, e.g. Google’s PageSpeed Insights and GTmetrix.

Reference: NGINX Documentation