SubdomainsBrowsers are limited to how many requests they can make to each URL. Fortunately, they count subdomains as separate requests. For a little quicker access, I highly recommend making a subdomain for "images", "js" and "css" and ensure that all code related to your images, scripts and style sheets are absolute links to the files in those subdomains. It helps!
GZip your files!Why? Because you can. Saves bandwidth and minimizes server load. MAKES PEOPLE HAPPY! And we all want that, right? In any case, this method is ideal: gzip your css and js files and whatever else you like... UPLOAD BOTH - because some browsers are stupid... and then modify your .htaccess file to include the following:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteOptions Inherit
#Check to see if browser can accept gzip files.
ReWriteCond %{HTTP:accept-encoding} (gzip.*)
#make sure there's no trailing .gz on the url
ReWriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !^.+\.gz$
#check to see if a .gz version of the file exists.
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME}.gz -f
#All conditions met so add .gz to URL filename (invisibly)
RewriteRule ^(.+) $1.gz [L]
This is a really neat .htaccess trick. Checks to see if there is a .gz copy of the file... if so, that's the one the visitor gets. Note that when updating a site... you won't see your change until you send your gzip copy to the server since your browser is NOT retarded. This gets... slightly confusing at times. I recommend taking down the gzip copies of the files you're changing until you're done. I believe this will work with a file of ANY extension but I've limited my use to scripts and stylesheets so far.
The author of this kick-butt .htaccess file is NOT me but Patrick Hunlock:
http://www.hunlock.com/blogs/Compressed_HTML_makes_your_pages_zippy. By far the best method I've seen as it works without the use of confusing PHP code that may or may not work on all servers.
On a side note... this method just STOPPED working for me yesterday when my web host upgraded their copy of Apache. As a few other parsing issues came up at the same time, there appears to be a bug with the newest Apache they're still trying to hammer out. In any case, that issue will be resolved, and it's still the best method I've seen.
