gzip encoding (mod_deflate) on DreamHost

It took me all of 10 minutes, and I just sped up Hebcal.com by enabling Apache mod_deflate on DreamHost.

I used the Google PageSpeed Insights tool to measure the performance of Hebcal, and it complained that we weren’t gzip-compressing HTML, CSS, or JavaScript.

Turns out this is not enabled on DreamHost sites by default. What a surprise!

So here’s what I ended up adding to the .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
 AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html text/css text/javascript
</IfModule>

That’s it!