Brotli or gzip compression enabled on text assets

Uncompressed text assets transfer 2–5x more bytes than their compressed equivalents (ISO-25010 resource-utilisation). A 245 KB JavaScript bundle served without compression transfers 245 KB; with Brotli compression it transfers approximately 55 KB — a 78% reduction. Every kilobyte saved reduces time-to-interactive on constrained connections, cuts CDN egress costs, and directly improves LCP for users on slower networks. Brotli consistently outperforms gzip by 15–25%, making it the preferred algorithm for static text assets.

Verify compression is active by checking response headers:

curl -sI -H "Accept-Encoding: br, gzip" https://yoursite.com/js/app.js | grep -i content-encoding
# Expected: content-encoding: br  (or gzip)

For Node.js servers without a CDN or reverse proxy in front, add the compression middleware:

// server.ts
import compression from 'compression'
import express from 'express'

const app = express()
app.use(compression())  // enables gzip by default

For Brotli (better compression ratio), use shrink-ray-current instead:

import shrinkRay from 'shrink-ray-current'
app.use(shrinkRay())  // serves br for capable clients, gzip as fallback

Vercel, Netlify, and Cloudflare enable Brotli by default — no configuration needed on those platforms.