Speed & performance
HTML is served uncompressed
One of the 136 checks Lala SEO runs on a whole site in a free audit.
- How serious
- Worth fixing. Weakens how Google reads or shows the page. Fix after the serious ones.
- Based on
- Industry standard: Google does not document this one, so the check follows established practice.
What is wrong
Your HTML pages are being sent to visitors without compression, meaning each page is larger than it needs to be. Modern browsers can decompress files automatically, but the server is not taking advantage of this. This is like mailing a letter in a large empty box instead of a padded envelope.
Why it costs you
When pages are larger, they take longer to download, especially on slow mobile connections. Visitors experience slower load times, and search engines crawl fewer of your pages in the same amount of time, leaving some undiscovered.
How to fix it
Enable gzip compression on your web server. If you use Apache, add `mod_deflate` to your configuration or add these lines to your `.htaccess` file: `<IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/plain text/xml text/css text/javascript application/javascript </IfModule>`. If you use Nginx, add `gzip on;` to your server block. If you use a hosting control panel like cPanel, look for a "Compression" or "Gzip" setting and enable it. Once enabled, HTML files will shrink to a fraction of their original size automatically.
What the audit tests
- The start page's HTML is sent compressed (gzip, Brotli, zstd or deflate)
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