How to enable gzip and brotli compression
Compression shrinks your HTML, CSS, and JavaScript on the server, so pages load faster and use less bandwidth. Turn it on as soon as you see a heavy page size or a missing Content-Encoding header in a speed test.
Check your site
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Enable compression in cPanel
In cPanel, open Optimize Website in the Software section and choose Compress All Content. This turns on gzip for text responses without editing any files.
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Add gzip rules to .htaccess
If the panel has no such option, open .htaccess in your site root through File Manager and add a mod_deflate block with AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE lines for text/html, text/css, application/javascript, and application/json.
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Enable brotli if the server supports it
Brotli compresses text tighter than gzip. On LiteSpeed hosting a cache plugin or a panel option turns it on; on Apache you need mod_brotli and an AddOutputFilterByType BROTLI_COMPRESS directive.
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Compress text types only
Add html, css, js, json, xml, svg, and fonts to the rules. Images like jpg, png, and webp are already compressed, so leave them out, since re-compressing only wastes CPU.
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Clear the cache and reload
After the change, clear your site cache (in WordPress via the cache plugin) and your browser cache so the server hands back the newly compressed page.
How to verify the result
Run the TechGuard speed test again: the response should now carry Content-Encoding: gzip or br, and the page size should drop noticeably. That confirms compression is actually working.
Tip: Do not enable compression in both Optimize Website and .htaccess, because double compression can serve the page as unreadable garbled text.
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