I have reported an issue in the tracker (https://bugs.python.org/issue30576) and proposed a Pull Request on the Github CPython repository ( https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/2078) to make http.server in the standard library support HTTP compression (gzip). I have been suggested to require feedback from core devs : - should HTTP compression be supported ? - if so, should it be supported by default ? It is the case in the PR, where a number of content types, eg text/html, are compressed if the user agent accepts the gzip "encoding" - if not, should the implementation of http.server be adapted so that subclasses could implement it ? For the moment the only way to add it is to modify method send_head() of SimpleHTTPRequestHandler My opinion is that it should be supported : http.server is not meant to be a full-featured HTTP server, but compression it is a basic and normalized feature of HTTP servers, it is supported by most browsers including on smartphones, it reduces network load, and it's very easy to implement (cf. the Pull Request). For the same reason, I recently added browser cache to http.server (PR #298 <https://github.com/python/cpython/pull/298>). I also think that it should be supported by default for the most common content types (text/html, text/css, application/javascript...) ; the implementation is based on a list of types to compress (SimpleHTTPServer.compressed_types) that can be modified at will, eg set to the empty list to disable compression.