Enable gzip compression in apache

When a user types your website url in browser and hits enter, browser sends request to server. Server responds to that request in the form of reply by giving back the requested document. That document can be of any size, typically if we take javascript files, it can be between 100 to 200 KB. Is there is any way to reduce this size so that the downloading can be faster ? Answer is "yes", that's what gzip compression does. It compresses the document size to almost 70% of the original. The major benefit of gzip compression is that it reduces bandwith by reducing the size of the response from the server.

How to minimize http requests

When it comes to website performance, number of requests made by your website to the server plays important role in total page download time. Since every request made includes round trip to server ( request and response ), it adds extra download time i.e total time spent during the trip. Also there are some limitations in the browser that how many parallel requests can be made to single domain. In a nutshell too many requests may decrease your website performance. Now we are going to look how can we minimize or reduce the number of HTTP requests.