How to Enable Gzip and Brotli Compression in Webflow

In this tutorial, Sandro, cofounder of Gemeos Webflow agency, shows you how to check and optimize resource compression on your Webflow site.

Good news: Webflow handles compression for you

Webflow uses the Fastly CDN, which automatically enables Gzip and Brotli on all text-based assets: HTML, CSS, JS, SVG. You don't need to configure anything. Just make sure your custom domain is being served through the Webflow CDN and not through an intermediate proxy that would disable compression.

1. Check that compression is active

In Chrome DevTools > Network, select an HTML or CSS request from your site. In the Headers tab, look for content-encoding: br (Brotli) or content-encoding: gzip in the Response Headers. If it's missing, your domain may be served through an unconfigured proxy.

2. Check your DNS configuration

If you're using Cloudflare as a proxy (orange cloud) in front of Webflow, Cloudflare may recompress assets. Make sure Cloudflare compression is set to Auto or Brotli in Speed > Optimization settings.

3. Optimize non-compressible assets

Images (WebP, AVIF, JPEG), videos, and WOFF2 fonts are already compressed internally. Gzip/Brotli compression doesn't affect them. Focus on reducing the weight of your CSS and JS instead of trying to compress these assets.

Conclusion

Compression is enabled by default in Webflow. The main thing is not to disable it by accident. Use cases:

• DNS configuration audit after a domain migration
• Check after adding a Cloudflare proxy
• Diagnosing an unusually low PageSpeed score