Speed up your site by compressing and caching your content with .htaccess

Please read Improving web site performance with Apache .htaccess for an updated version of this article.

.htaccess - gzip and cache your site for faster loading and bandwidth saving is one of the most popular posts on samaxes. It’s basically on how to compress and cache your site content with Apache and .htaccess file.

It works like a charm, but it’s not yet the perfect configuration for me. I wanted something that I can use out-of-the-box without having to rely on external extension modules or tools.

If you are lucky enough to have Apache 2 with your hosting provider you can use the mod_deflate module that comes bundled with it.

In order to compress your text files with this Apache’s module you just have to add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

<ifModule mod_deflate.c>
  <filesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>

This will gzip all your _.css, _.js, _.html, _.html, _.xhtml, and _.php files.

A great .htaccess file example that will gzip your text files and cache all your static files, may look like:

# BEGIN Compress text files
<ifModule mod_deflate.c>
  <filesMatch "\.(css|js|x?html?|php)$">
    SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>
# END Compress text files

# BEGIN Expire headers
<ifModule mod_expires.c>
  ExpiresActive On
  ExpiresDefault "access plus 1 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 2592000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 604800 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/x-javascript "access plus 216000 seconds"
  ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 600 seconds"
  ExpiresByType application/xhtml+xml "access plus 600 seconds"
</ifModule>
# END Expire headers

# BEGIN Cache-Control Headers
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  <filesMatch "\.(ico|jpe?g|png|gif|swf)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(css)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(js)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=216000, private"
  </filesMatch>
  <filesMatch "\.(x?html?|php)$">
    Header set Cache-Control "max-age=600, private, must-revalidate"
  </filesMatch>
</ifModule>
# END Cache-Control Headers

# BEGIN Turn ETags Off
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  Header unset ETag
</ifModule>
FileETag None
# END Turn ETags Off

# BEGIN Remove Last-Modified Header
<ifModule mod_headers.c>
  Header unset Last-Modified
</ifModule>
# END Remove Last-Modified Header

This will surely improve your site performance by one order of magnitude. Try it!