This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ferry Ananda Febian
A few days ago, I was puzzled about why the website I built felt extremely slow when loading a JavaScript file.
Imagine this: a file of just 2 MB took 2–5 minutes to load in the browser. 
After digging into it, the issue turned out to be simple: I forgot to enable gzip in my Nginx configuration.
What is gzip?
gzip is a compression method that allows the server to send smaller-sized files to the browser.
Instead of downloading the full raw file, the browser only needs to fetch the compressed version.
The Fix
I added the following config to my Nginx Proxy Manager:
gzip on;
gzip_comp_level 6;
gzip_min_length 256;
gzip_proxied any;
gzip_vary on;
gzip_types
text/plain
text/css
application/json
application/javascript
application/x-javascript
text/javascript
application/xml
application/rss+xml
application/atom+xml
application/vnd.ms-fontobject
application/x-font-ttf
font/opentype
image/svg+xml
image/x-icon;
The Result
The website performance improved instantly:
From 2–5 minutes → to less than 1 second for a 2 MB file.
Key Takeaways
- Small optimizations can lead to massive improvements.
- Never underestimate basic server configuration.
- A single setting can completely transform user experience.
Sometimes it’s not expensive hardware or the latest framework that makes a website faster, but rather a simple config tweak like this. 
So, if your website feels slow, it might be worth checking whether gzip is enabled on your server.
Have you ever found a performance bottleneck where the solution turned out to be this simple?
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by Ferry Ananda Febian