Title: Getting Content Encoding Error
Last modified: October 6, 2016

---

# Getting Content Encoding Error

 *  [MyWPun](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mywpun/)
 * (@mywpun)
 * [9 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/)
 * I’m having this error when opening random pages/posts:
 *  Content Encoding Error
 *  The page you are trying to view cannot be shown because it uses an invalid or
   unsupported form of compression.
 *  * Please contact the website owners to inform them of this problem.
 * Also some of the website visitors reported the same issues, I did some tests 
   with Chrome/Firefox (disabling/enabling the plugins) and now I’m sure it’s related
   to W3 Total Cache, I deleted the plugin and 2 remaining files I found with FileZilla(
   despite I clicked delete all), the website runs just fine.
 * Is there any fix for this problem?

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

 *  [nicjansma](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nicjansma/)
 * (@nicjansma)
 * [9 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8259424)
 * I’m getting possibly the same issue.
 * What I see is garbled letters, almost as if Chrome is trying to display gzipped
   content.
 * Latest Chrome, IE and FF on Windows:
    ⌊Browser view⌉
 * Response headers:
    ⌊Headers⌉
 * The Content-Encoding says gzip, but the decompressed content also appears to 
   be gzipped (or just garbage?).
 * It doesn’t happen on every page load. If I force a reload, the page seems to 
   work most of the time.
 * Disabling W3 Total Cache fixes this.
 * Strangely curl from the command line doesn’t seem to reproduce this.
    -  This reply was modified 9 years, 7 months ago by [nicjansma](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nicjansma/).
 *  [Scott Hartley](https://wordpress.org/support/users/destac/)
 * (@destac)
 * [9 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8260116)
 * Disable GZIP in your browser cache settings.
 *  [nicjansma](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nicjansma/)
 * (@nicjansma)
 * [9 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8260181)
 * That (disabling Compression/gzip in Browser Cache) seemed to work for me.
 * However, I will note that I’ve been running with that setting enabled for several
   years without an issue. Nothing else on the server was changed, except WordPress/
   plugin updates recently.
 *  Thread Starter [MyWPun](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mywpun/)
 * (@mywpun)
 * [9 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8260317)
 * Hello everyone,
 * [@nicjansma](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nicjansma/), this is exactly
   the error that the visitors of my website are reporting.
 * [@destac](https://wordpress.org/support/users/destac/), thank you for the information,
   I’ll see if it works.
 *  Thread Starter [MyWPun](https://wordpress.org/support/users/mywpun/)
 * (@mywpun)
 * [9 years, 7 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8263198)
 * The problem seems to be fixed, thank you all.
 *  [tekstura1977](https://wordpress.org/support/users/tekstura1977/)
 * (@tekstura1977)
 * [9 years, 2 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8932449)
 * The problem is that disabling gzip compression makes performance worse. For example
   site with wp super cache installed when using gzip compression get 96/100 points
   in google insights speed test. When I disabled gzip compression the result is
   much worse: onlu 72/100 points. Anybody knows if there is any hint to use this
   compression but not have this error?
 *  [Vietnam Indexing](https://wordpress.org/support/users/vietdex/)
 * (@vietdex)
 * [9 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-8961987)
 * Today my page get error again ! Disable Gzip can slove this problem !
 *  [wire67](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wire67/)
 * (@wire67)
 * [9 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-9004546)
 * same here, it gives this error on the search result page and goes away with CTRL
   +F5.
    I cannot ask visitors to disable Gzip.
 *  [wire67](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wire67/)
 * (@wire67)
 * [9 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-9004586)
 * Deactivating the pluging **WP Super Cache** solved the issue…

Viewing 9 replies - 1 through 9 (of 9 total)

The topic ‘Getting Content Encoding Error’ is closed to new replies.

 * ![](https://ps.w.org/w3-total-cache/assets/icon-256x256.png?rev=1041806)
 * [W3 Total Cache](https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/)
 * [Frequently Asked Questions](https://wordpress.org/plugins/w3-total-cache/#faq)
 * [Support Threads](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/w3-total-cache/)
 * [Active Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/w3-total-cache/active/)
 * [Unresolved Topics](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/w3-total-cache/unresolved/)
 * [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/w3-total-cache/reviews/)

## Tags

 * [gzip compression](https://wordpress.org/support/topic-tag/gzip-compression/)

 * 9 replies
 * 6 participants
 * Last reply from: [wire67](https://wordpress.org/support/users/wire67/)
 * Last activity: [9 years, 1 month ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/getting-content-encoding-error/#post-9004586)
 * Status: not resolved