What to ask your agency about response compression

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on response compression, these questions are worth asking early.

Performance work is mostly subtraction, which makes it unpopular and effective. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Text compresses dramatically and costs almost nothing to enable. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

Already-compressed formats gain nothing from it. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

In practice

Speed is a feature people notice only in its absence, and then they leave rather than complain. Three things worth confirming about response compression before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Text compresses dramatically and costs almost nothing to enable — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Pick the one that would hurt most if it failed, and start there.