Enable gzip or brotli compression — Windsurf

Uncompressed responses waste bandwidth and slow down Core Web Vitals. Brotli is the modern standard — enable it on Vercel, Netlify, or your CDN.

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Fixing this in Windsurf

Codeium agentic AI IDE with Cascade

Windsurf Cascade can walk the entire project and apply multi-file edits in one pass. Paste the prompt below into your Windsurf chat and the fix rolls out across the project in one pass.

Using a different tool? Pick your stack:

Lovable Cursor Bolt v0 Replit Windsurf Claude Code Base44

The prompt for Windsurf

Copy and paste this into your Windsurf chat exactly as-is.

Using Windsurf Cascade, apply these edits across the project in one pass:

Enable compression

1. Enable gzip or Brotli compression on your web server / hosting.
2. For Vercel/Netlify this is automatic. For custom servers, configure nginx/Apache gzip.

Why this matters

HTML, CSS, and JavaScript compress extremely well — typically 70-80% smaller. That shaves hundreds of milliseconds off Time to First Byte and LCP, especially on mobile.

Every major host supports this out of the box (Vercel, Netlify, Cloudflare, Replit). Self-hosted? Enable it in nginx/Caddy/Apache config. Brotli is preferable; gzip is the universal fallback.

How to use this prompt in Windsurf

1. Open your Windsurf project.
2. Copy the prompt above with the copy button.
3. Paste into the Windsurf chat and send.
4. Review the diff, accept the changes, redeploy.
5. Verify the fix using the checklist below.

Common mistakes to avoid

error_outlineCompressing already-compressed assets (JPEG, PNG, WebP) — waste of CPU.
error_outlineEnabling compression but not for the right content types — images and PDFs should not be recompressed.
error_outlineAssuming your host does it automatically without verifying.

How to verify the fix worked

check_circle`curl -I -H "Accept-Encoding: br" URL` — `Content-Encoding: br` in response.
check_circleChrome DevTools → Network → response headers show `content-encoding`.
check_circlehttps://tools.keycdn.com/brotli-test — green check.

Frequently asked questions

gzip or brotli?expand_more

Brotli is ~15-20% better than gzip on text. All modern browsers support it. Ship brotli, fall back to gzip.

Does it hurt CPU?expand_more

Negligibly, and hosts pre-compress static assets at build. Cost is near-zero.

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