Is GZIP Compression Always Desirable?
 

I'm wondering if there is any unintended downside to GZIP Compression? Some people seem to think that there is almost ZERO downside to using this as a method for speeding up your website loading time.

The reason I ask is because our sign ups from our site averaged 30/day.

When we enabled GZIP (through mod_deflate on Apache server) they averaged 22/day, even though our website is loading perceptibly faster.

My suspicion is that this may have affected mobile users although I am unable to confirm this. Is there anything that could have happened or was unintended?

Any views appreciated......

gzip/deflate support is signalled via a header that the browser sends, so it should be backward compatible - your server will send plain text if it doesn't see an Accept-Encoding header.

Is there any way to record the user agent of new signups? That may help you show whether there's an issue with a particular buggy browser, or something wrong with your server. Could also just be natural random variance.

Totally random but I have disabled it on my sites after finding that the CPU time it takes to gzip everything is more expensive (and slower) than the extra bandwidth if I don't gzip

As rowan says, enabling gzip compression shouldn't have affected any of your users. If a browser doesn't support compression it will simply not request it from the server, in which case the site loads just as it did before.

Lower page-load times can boost a site's ranking in Google search results, so if you're concerned about SEO at all I'd leave compression enabled.

I bet what you're seeing is just a natural fluctuation in traffic.

Thanks for the well considered feedback guys..... I will leave GZIP enabled.

If your worries are just about the signup page, I'm pretty sure you can exclude gzip compression for just the signup page.