Speed Tips: Turn On Compression

Apache 2 uses mod_deflate to quickly and easily compress your static .css and .js files before you send them to a client. This speeds up your site like crazy!

.htaccess media caching

FWIW, this is how I configure Apache to set the Expires header:

Header unset ETag
FileETag None

Header unset Last-Modified
Header set Expires "Fri, 21 Dec 2012 00:00:00 GMT"
Header set Cache-Control "public, no-transform"

The reason I remove and disable the ETag is because supposedly some browsers will ignore your Expires header when it's present:

The reason I remove the Last-Modified header is for the same reason:

The reason I set the Cache-Control header to 'public' is so the browser will cache media over HTTPS (see tip #3):

The reason I set the Cache-Control header to 'no-transform' is to prevent proxies from modifying my content.

--Bil

Turn Gzip Compression On

This goes in your root .htaccess file but if you have access to httpd.conf that is better.

This code uses the FilesMatch directive and the SetOutputFilter DEFLATE directive to only target files ending in .js or .css

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

Without mod_deflate

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With mod_deflate

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Bandwidth Savings

Conditional Compression

# Compress everything except images


# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

# Netscape 4.x has some problems...
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html

# Netscape 4.06-4.08 have some more problems
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4.0[678] no-gzip

# MSIE masquerades as Netscape, but it is fine
BrowserMatch bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
# Don't compress images
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI .(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

# Make sure proxies don't deliver the wrong content
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary