**Compression and modern protocols make your site faster to deliver — smaller transfers and more efficient connections, for free.** This check looks at whether your responses are compressed (gzip or Brotli) and served over modern protocols (HTTP/2 or HTTP/3). These are well-established, low-effort wins that cut how much data travels and how efficiently it's delivered, benefiting every user and crawler.
It checks how efficiently your responses are compressed and delivered. Specifically:
- Compression — whether text resources (HTML, CSS, JS) are compressed with gzip or, better, Brotli.
- HTTP version — whether the site is served over HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 rather than the older HTTP/1.1.
- Efficiency — whether the delivery setup minimises transfer size and connection overhead.
Compression plus HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 passes; one present but not the other is a warning; no compression and legacy HTTP/1.1 is a fail.
GEObubbly inspects the response headers and protocol of the live connection to check compression and HTTP version. It's an extended Infrastructure check that runs partially, since it observes the live delivery.
Criteria: Pass — compressed over HTTP/2/3. Warning — one but not both. Fail — uncompressed over HTTP/1.1.
Two delivery-layer improvements make your site meaningfully faster with essentially no downside. Compression: text-based resources like HTML, CSS and JavaScript compress extremely well, and enabling gzip — or better, Brotli, which typically compresses smaller — can cut their transfer size dramatically, so pages download faster, especially on slower connections. Modern protocols: HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 deliver resources far more efficiently than the legacy HTTP/1.1, with features like multiplexing and, for HTTP/3, faster, more resilient connections over QUIC. Both are widely supported and usually a configuration toggle rather than a code change. The payoff is reduced transfer size and connection overhead, which improves loading speed and Core Web Vitals, and makes your site cheaper for crawlers to fetch — so engines, including AI crawlers, can cover more per visit.
HTTP compression shrinks the size of text-based responses — HTML, CSS, JavaScript — before they're sent to the browser, which then decompresses them. Gzip is the long-established standard, and Brotli is a newer algorithm that typically achieves smaller sizes, especially for text. Because these resources compress very well, enabling compression can cut transfer sizes substantially, meaning pages download faster and use less bandwidth — a noticeable benefit on slower or mobile connections. It's usually a simple server or CDN setting to turn on, and it's one of the easiest performance wins available with no downside to content.
HTTP/1.1 is the older protocol that handles requests largely one connection at a time, which creates bottlenecks when a page needs many resources. HTTP/2 introduced multiplexing — sending many resources over a single connection simultaneously without head-of-line blocking — plus header compression, making delivery much more efficient. HTTP/3 goes further by running over QUIC (a UDP-based transport) for faster connection setup and better resilience on unstable networks. Each generation reduces the overhead of fetching a page's many resources, so serving over HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 delivers your content faster than legacy HTTP/1.1.
Both are typically configuration-level changes rather than code changes. Compression (gzip or Brotli) is enabled in your web server or CDN settings, often with a single directive or toggle that applies it to text resource types. HTTP/2 and HTTP/3 support depends on your server software, hosting or CDN — many modern hosts and CDNs support them out of the box or with a simple setting, and HTTP/2 generally requires HTTPS. If you use a CDN, it often handles both compression and modern protocols automatically at the edge.
Yes, positively. Compression reduces how much data the browser has to download, and HTTP/2 or HTTP/3 deliver that data more efficiently with less connection overhead — both of which speed up loading and can improve the Largest Contentful Paint and overall responsiveness. They reduce the time spent transferring resources, which is part of what Core Web Vitals measure. While they're not the only factor (image weight, render-blocking and server response also matter), enabling compression and modern protocols is a straightforward, low-risk way to shave time off delivery and support better Core Web Vitals.
Indirectly. Compression and modern protocols make your pages faster and cheaper to fetch, so crawlers — including AI crawlers — can retrieve your content more efficiently and cover more of your site per visit. Lighter, faster-delivered pages reduce the cost of crawling, which supports thorough, frequent crawling of your content. They're not a direct GEO ranking factor, but as part of an efficient, well-built delivery setup they help ensure engines can access your content smoothly.