Some users have reported that certain website speed testing tools show poor results for “Compress components with Gzip” on websites hosted with RunCloud. This post will explain why this occurs and clarify that it’s not an issue with our compression, but rather a limitation of some testing tools.
RunCloud uses Brotli compression, which is a more efficient alternative to Gzip. Brotli offers several advantages over Gzip such as better compression ratios (typically 20-30% smaller file sizes), faster decompression, leading to quicker page load times, and it is supported by all major modern web browsers. However, some testing tools don’t recognize Brotli compression and incorrectly report that Gzip is not being used.
Verifying Compression
Follow the given steps to verify that your website is using compression:
- Open your website in Google Chrome.
- Right-click and select “Inspect” to open Developer Tools.
- Go to the Network tab and reload the page.
- Click on any resource and check the “Response Headers”.
- Look for content-encoding: br (for Brotli) or content-encoding: gzip.
Poor test results for Gzip compression should not be a cause for concern. Your RunCloud-hosted website is using state-of-the-art Brotli compression, which is more efficient than Gzip. Negative scores are often simply due to limitations in some testing tools’ methodologies. While some older tools may not recognize Brotli, many modern performance testing tools do. We recommend using advanced tools like Google’s PageSpeed Insights to get a comprehensive view of your website’s performance.
