Caching and Compression with Gzip(.htaccess)

Caching is whereby a browser downloads a web page files and saves for use later when the page is visited again.This usually helps in improving the speed of your websites loadtime.

We achieve caching using htaccess with this code snippet:

# 480 weeks
<FilesMatch "\.(ico|pdf|flv|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|js|css|swf)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=290304000, public"
</FilesMatch>

# 2 DAYS
<FilesMatch "\.(xml|txt)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=172800, public, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

# 2 HOURS
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=7200, must-revalidate"
</FilesMatch>

Compression using Gzip

Another way of improving your websites speed is by compressing files.Compression reduces the size of files and therefore enabling faster loading.

Here is the Gzip code snippet for compressing files:

<ifModule mod_gzip.c>
  mod_gzip_on Yes
  mod_gzip_dechunk Yes
  mod_gzip_item_include file \.(html?|txt|css|js|php|pl)$
  mod_gzip_item_include handler ^cgi-script$
  mod_gzip_item_include mime ^text/.*
  mod_gzip_item_include mime ^application/x-javascript.*
  mod_gzip_item_exclude mime ^image/.*
  mod_gzip_item_exclude rspheader ^Content-Encoding:.*gzip.*
</ifModule>

NOTE:You must have RewriteEngine on in your htaccess file.