static files shown as uncompressed even when web server has been configured for gzip compression

Question

I have hosted my website on Amazon Elastic BeanStalk. It uses nginx as proxy server and has gzip compression enabled. But when I run PageInsights on the site, it reports that many of my static content files need to be gzipped. Why is PageSpeed Insights not recognizing the compression? Is there something extra that needs to be done?

Answer 1

I think I actully found the answer

By enabling gzip compression on nginx, you enable it only for text/html (that is nginx default http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/ngx_http_gzip_module.html#gzip_types)

In order to enable it for other types, you have to do it explicitly. In case of beanstalk, create the following file in your project

.ebextensions/gzip.config

and put the code there (make sure you keep the indentation, it is important):

files:
  /etc/nginx/conf.d/gzip.conf:
    content: |
      gzip_types application/json;

As you can see, in my case I needed to gzip json files, you are probably having problems with Pagespeed complaining about css and js files, right? As the link above suggests you can use a * wildcard to compress everything, but if not, just list the mime types you need in the config, deploy it, and check PageSpeed Insights again.