Pssst… have you noticed your site loading a bit faster than usual?
It’s not your imagination!
We’re happy to let you know that we’ve rolled out Brotli to all of your WPMU DEV hosted sites, giving you on average 11.62% better compression than before (and faster sites as a result!)
It’s a change that’ll make a big difference particularly if your website includes lots of data, such as images, videos and other multimedia.
Keep reading to learn more about Brotli and how it will benefit your site.
What is Brotli?
Brotli, a compression algorithm developed by Google, offers significantly better compression rates than the traditional GZIP methodology we were previously running.
It compresses files more efficiently, producing smaller file sizes which reduces the bandwidth usage. This means your site will load faster and your visitors will have a smoother experience, especially if they’re on their mobile device or if they have a slower internet connection.
Brotli is supported by all modern browsers, so it’ll improve the experience for almost all of your users. If you’re not sure if your browser is supported or not, you can use this link to find out!
And don’t worry about the users who are on an older browser or a browser that doesn’t support Brotli yet. For them, your site will simply fall back to GZIP and it will still work.
What Do I Need to Do?
Good news – you don’t need to do anything.
Brotli has been enabled on your site by default, so you’re already enjoying that speed boost. Perhaps you noticed things were a bit faster? This is the reason why!
This *also* means that if you’ve been using a CDN provider (like, ahem, Cloudflare) to use Brotli, you no longer need it. 🙂
$avings!
How Much Faster is Brotli?
We rigorously tested Brotli to see if it really lives up to its promises.
We compared GZIP and Brotli compression on various WordPress files, such as the default “Hello World” post, as well as home pages from WPMU DEV templates including Landscaping, Modern Business, Persona and Simple Business.
As you can see from the results, Brotli beat out GZIP for bytes saved every time, making each file more effectively compressed.
The lower the numbers when it comes to data size in bytes, the better! As you can see in the table below, Brotli saved bytes in all categories, up to 17.02% for the modern business site.
If you’re interested to learn more about Brotli and how it works, you can check out the technical details here.
