Gzip compressionHow To Optimize Your Site With GZIP Compression is a bit of a mixed bag.  While it can improve data transfer speeds and, therefore, perceived better website performance at the client end, people should be careful using Joomla’s Gzip features if they don’t know how they work.

Misusing Joomla’s Gzip features can cause browser errors and can potentially result in you not being able to manage your website.  There are two different problems relating to Gzip in Joomla:  (1) content encoding errors and (2) loss of CSS styling—frontend and backend—also known as the J! 4 “double gzip” problem.

This problem affects people who updated to J! 3.10.7 or J! 4.1.1Release date:  30 March 2022. but it may reappear in a future release after those releases were withdrawn from distribution.  In this article I will try to explain:

1. What the J! developers were trying to achieve.
2. How the problem can be reproduced; and
3. How to workaround the error generated as a consequence.

I want to be perfectly clear:  this article is about whether people must update to Joomla 4.x.  This article is not about whether people should update to J! 4.x, what are the benefits or problems and/or disadvantages in doing so.

If you are using J! 3.10A similar feature was added in J! 2.5.28 to “remind” people that support for this version would cease on 31-Dec-2014.  This feature could be turned off by disabling a plugin. you will have seen a notice about “End of Support” when you login.

j4Hassle2 j4Hassle3 j4Hassle4 j4Hassle5 These message escalate in severity, from benign “informational” notices, through a “warning” phase and ultimately are displayed as “errors”.Joomla 3.10: End of Support Handling  The images at the right of the screen show how those messages will appear over time, starting on 17-Aug-2021, changing every six months, until the last message will appear on 17-Aug-2023.  These messages can be temporarily hidden, by clicking the close icon located in the top right corner, these messages will reappear every time you visit the backend “home page”. The informational and warning messages can be “snoozed” by clicking the orange button but the final “error” phase cannot be snoozed.