Netlify Edge, our globally distributed, intelligent CDN quietly and automatically delivers abilities to developers which were once only within reach of enterprises with big budgets and expert consultants.
Working in concert with Netlify Build (our integrated CI/CD), it delivers things like instant cache invalidation, instant rollbacks, edge-routing, and automatic asset compression and caching.
Developers don’t need to be CDN or caching experts to make this happen. It just works.
While automated gzip compression has been present since the beginning. Performance-minded developers have also been telling us how valuable it would be to add support for Brotli too. We heard them, and we agree.
Pass the Brotli
We are delighted to announce that assets delivered by Netlify Edge are now automatically compressed with Brotli encoding for even smaller asset sizes and decompression efficiency.
Brotli compression has gained widespread browser support and is particularly effective for text-based files such as HTML, JavaScript and CSS assets. Developers don’t need to take any action for their sites to start benefitting. Netlify Edge is already encoding and caching suitable assets with Brotli, and delivering correctly compressed assets depending on the requesting browser.
If you were looking, you might already have spotted signs of this upgrade. And the visitors to your sites have already started enjoying the benefits.
Better performance, less bandwidth
The smaller file sizes generated by Brotli compression doesn’t just mean that files are delivered to your users more rapidly, it also means that you’ll use less bandwidth to service the same number of requests. Nice.
Median Brotli / gzip comparisons, according to Akamai’s testing:
- JavaScript files compressed with Brotli are 14% smaller than gzip.
- HTML files are 21% smaller than gzip.
- CSS files are 17% smaller than gzip.
Do what?
You don’t need to do anything to start using Brotli compression. Just as with our automatic gzip compression. It just works.
New to Netlify? Want to deploy a project to test and explore? Why not deploy an example project by clicking the button below to get started less than a minute.
If you have questions or comments about Brotli compression in Netlify Edge or any other features, head over to the Netlify community forums.
