Response compression for small teams

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. Most advice about response compression assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Real-world numbers from actual visitors matter more than a score produced on a fast laptop. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

What to keep

Text compresses dramatically and costs almost nothing to enable. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly.

How we handle it

Already-compressed formats gain nothing from it. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. 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
• Already-compressed formats gain nothing from it — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you are not sure where your systems currently stand on this, it takes us about an hour to find out.