How to test if a website supports Brotli or Gzip compression
After migrating this blog to Hugo we performed some optimization steps to ensure it is as quick as possible. Pages are slim and small in size, but still can be compressed. Normally we would do this on the end of the web server, by enabling dynamic compression. So each time a client requested a compressed page, the web server would compress is and send over the data. This time we turned things around.
Compress data upfront
Using the brotli command we can compress files and store them on the webserver. So if we have a file named index.html, we can tell the tool to compress it. By using the --best parameter, we tell it to get the best possible compression. After all, it’s a one-time action, so why not take our best shot?
Using the tool is very straightforward: brotli --best index.html
The
brotlitool is usually not installed by default
Using Firefox to test if compression is working
- Open Firefox
- Press CTRL + SHIFT + i
- Click on the Network tab
- Open the web page to test, hard refresh if needed (CTRL + SHIFT + r)
- Look at the first column to see if a 200 response code is returned
- Look at the columns Transferred and Size to see if they are different
- Click on the request, which opens up all details
- Confirm that the browser supports compression. Most likely the Request Headers section will show Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate, br to indicate that it supports multiple types of compression
- Then confirm that Response Headers show content-encoding. If Brotli is used, then the value will display this as br
Using curl to test if compression is working
To test if compression is working as expected, we can also use the cURL utility. Nowadays it is installed on most systems, so why not use that instead?
curl --head --header 'Accept-Encoding: br' --silent https://linux-audit.com/ | grep content-encoding
So what does it do?
| Parameter | Explanation |
|---|---|
| --head | performs a HEAD request and returns only the headers, not the actual data |
| --header | includes the header where we tell that we would accept Brotli encoding |
| --silent | suppresses the progress output within cURL |
If everything is working as expected, the output should include the encoding provided by the web server.
content-encoding: br
Good luck in further optimizing your web server(s)!
