: Why does Google mobile site test say my site is not compressed when it uses content-encoding:br? I used this Google tool to test my web site. When I got the report it recommended the following..

@LarsenBagley505

Compress resources with GZIP


This is another one of those things where new technology is being shoved into our faces and some companies and/or tools aren't setup to handle it (such as the Google page speed insights). After looking at the new compression info, it seems only newer web browsers support it.

A large number of tools and web servers still support GZIP compression, but some servers (including nginx as per your link on the br compression) don't have it where one can enable it in the server.

Because the goal of a website is to present information to users from around the world, we have to try to make much of the world happy by creating two versions of a webpage. One version being compressed with GZIP and the other version not compressed at all for browsers that don't support compression.

When the user loads the page, the browser tells the server what compression methods it can handle (example: GZIP) and if the server also supports it, then the content is downloaded compressed then extracted on the user's computer and then the HTML is processed in the browser. If however the user's browser can't handle the compression then the server should delivered the uncompressed version. This is better than users seeing errors.

Vote Up Vote Down