Highlights of web technology surveys, July 2011: Usage of HTTP compression

Posted by Matthias Gelbmann on 1 July 2011 in News, Compression

One of the technologies we included recently in our surveys is HTTP compression. This are methods to compress the content of a web page on the server before it is transmitted to the client. Doing so saves bandwidth, and in most cases speeds up web browsing.

Compression is used only by 38% of all websites. That seems low, considering the advantages it brings.

Practically all big sites use compression: Google, Facebook, YouTube, Yahoo, Wikipedia, Amazon, you name it. The ranking breakdown report reveals that 78% of the top 1,000 sites compress their pages. A big difference to the 38% average.

The web server breakdown report shows surprising differences: While the high compression usage on Google Servers can be explained by the fact that those are configured by Google, the difference between 90% compression on LiteSpeed servers vs. only 24% compression on servers running Microsoft-IIS is quite amazing. We see a similar pattern in other breakdown reports: ASP.NET sites don't fancy compression, while sites built in Ruby do. Windows based servers have a lower than average usage of compression, but still more than the very few web servers running on Mac OS.

Another fact that is hard to explain are the big geographical differences, as seen in the top level domain breakdown report: while almost 61% of French sites and 59% of Polish sites compress, only 22% of Chinese and 13% of Japanese ones do.

HTTP allows several compression methods to be used, but in practice Gzip is used by most sites.

As this is a new survey, we don't have historical data yet. Let's see how the usage of compression evolves in the next months.

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Please note, that all trends and figures mentioned in that article are valid at the time of writing. Our surveys are updated frequently, and these trends and figures are likely to change over time.

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