I have been experimenting with minimal compression to raise the level a tiny bit on the entire recording.
What you are doing, and what Page suggests, does what I think you are asking to do. To clarify the conceptual basis behind what this is doing, and explain sort of the opposite way of doing something which may seem similar, but really isn't, I'll try to explain what's going on with both. I hope that will, in part, help explain two different ways of using compression, but I also mention this because I have had others ask this question in a similar way, and what they really were trying to do was this second thing.
What you are doing here with the way your compression routine is set will
automatically lower the level on just the loudest parts, which in turn provides more empty room 'up top' in the 'range of available loudnesses' and allows you to increase the level of everything without 'hitting the ceiling'. The compression is making the very loudest parts less loud, and the 'make-up gain' you apply raises the level of everything to take advantage of that empty space up top. This is basically the same as just turning up the volume knob a bit more and leaving it there all the time, except for the very loudest parts where the volume knob gets automatically turned down and back up again rapidly. A limiter basically acts the same and just turns the volume knob faster when it kicks in.
If your goal was to make
the loudness difference less extreme across the entire recording, which is often described as "turning up the volume of the entire recording" in similar language, then you would instead want to set a very low threshold and use a very low compression ratio like 1:1.2 or 1:1.5 or something, not more than 1:2. With the appropriate amount of makup-gain applied, that would be more like constantly adjusting the volume knob automatically the entire time, turning the quiet parts up and the loud parts down so that in general, the entire recording sounds 'louder'. That's very much the opposite of limiting.
Both techniques are reducing the overall dynamic range, which allows you to increase the average level with makeup-gain. But the second is reducing the entire range more or less equally, the first is reducing just the peaks.
I've used regular language above to describe this to help make understanding it simpler, but actually I've used the common terms 'volume' and 'loudness' incorrectly in a technical sense. Volume is technically a measure of 3-dimensional space, and has nothing to do with sound levels or signal level voltage. Loudness is technically the human perception of sound level, or how loud sounds seem to be to the listener, despite their true levels. It's closely related to how we perceive what compression is doing, but the compression routines themselves only deal with signal levels. So you can actually substitute 'signal level' for 'loudness' and 'volume' in much of the explanation above.
I hope that's more helpful than confusing.