Let’s start with things that do not really concern Django. With Gzip + Nginx.

Gzip

With Nginx, go to /etc/nginx/nginx.conf (or make a separate /etc/nginx/conf.d/*.conf) and in the body of http add:

gzip on;
gzip_disable "msie6";

Then with curl you can check whether it worked, in the example you see my website Lingomost:

curl https://lingomost.com/ --silent --write-out "%{size_download}\n" --output /dev/null
>> 38849

Response length without encoding is 38849.

curl https://lingomost.com/ --silent -H "Accept-Encoding: gzip,deflate" --write-out "%{size_download}\n" --output /dev/null
>> 7623

And with Accept-Encoding it is 7623 -> therefore the settings applied succesfully.

Or you can look at files in Chrome/Chromium -> F12 -> Network and look for Content-Encoding line in Response Headers.

References

• https://stackoverflow.com/a/9140223
• https://stackoverflow.com/a/18834602