Compression is a simple, effective way to save bandwidth and speed up your site. I hesitated when recommending gzip compression when speeding up your javascript because of problems in older browsers . But it's the 21st century. Most of my traffic comes from modern browsers, and quite frankly, most of my users are fairly tech-savvy. I don't want to slow everyone else down because somebody is chugging along on IE 4.0 on Windows 95. Google and Yahoo use gzip compression. A modern browser is needed to enjoy modern web content and modern web speed -- so gzip encoding it is. Here's how to set it up. Wait, wait, wait: Why are we doing this? Before we start I should explain what content encoding is. When you request a file like http://www.yahoo.com/index.html , your browser talks to a web server. The conversation goes a little like this: 1. Browser: Hey, GET me /index.html 2. Server: Ok, let me see if index.html is lying around... 3. Server: Found it!