The .htaccess files allow developers to make server configuration changes on a per-directory basis. Magento comes packaged with many .htaccess files, but the one which we will be dealing with in this section is the .htaccess file found on the root of our installation. As mentioned previously, in order to edit our .htaccess file, we must make sure that the web editor we are using can see the hidden files.

The most basic of performance-based .htaccess tweaks that we can make are implementing Content-Encoding (mod_deflate/mod_gzip) and Expiration Headers (mod_expires).

The gzip compression essentially presents the browser with a zipped version of the file. Compressing the file before transferring it reduces the download time required. We should add the following lines of code to our root .htaccess file in order to use these methods (if available on the server):

<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
  SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
  BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
  BrowserMatch...