Brotli compression for HTML: Crawl Audit check 90

Short answer: Brotli is a newer compression method that usually makes text files smaller than gzip. Almost every browser in use supports it. Check 90 passes when your homepage's HTML arrives Brotli-compressed, and warns when it's gzip, Zstandard or nothing. It's a low-impact check: if check 89 passes, you're already compressing.

What Crawl Audit checks

• Crawl Audit reads the Content-Encoding header on your homepage's HTML.
• Pass: br. Warning: gzip or zstd without br, or no compression at all.

A Zstandard result gets a warning here even though it's a modern, efficient compression. Cloudflare's Free plan compresses with Zstandard by default ("Free Plan: Content is compressed by default using Zstandard"), so a well-set-up site on it can see this warning. That's fine.

What the sources say

• MDN: "Brotli provides better compression ratios than gzip, and speeds that are comparable to deflate."
• Lighthouse: "If the browser supports Brotli (br) you should use Brotli because it can reduce the file size of the resources more than the other compression algorithms." And: "Use GZIP as a fallback to Brotli."
• Support: Chrome 50, Firefox 44, Safari 11 and Edge 15 onwards, about 97% of browsers in use according to caniuse on 3 October 2026.

The browser says which methods it accepts, and the server picks one, so older browsers still get gzip.

On devmarde.com

Our homepage arrives as br from Vercel, so it passes.

On your platform

• Vercel: "If your client supports brotli, it takes precedence over gzip".
• Cloudflare: Pro and Business plans compress with Brotli by default; Free uses Zstandard; Enterprise uses gzip.
• Your own server: nginx and Apache need a Brotli module. Many managed hosts have a switch for it.

Sources

• MDN, Brotli compression, checked 3 October 2026.
• Chrome for Developers, Enable text compression; Can I use: Brotli.
• Vercel, Compression; Cloudflare, Compression.