Performance and optimization of a websites is very important aspect. After a website is developed and deployed it must be optimized. So how it can be done?
Tools to identify
1. Google page speed - This tool analyze the website performance ina very user friendly way. It is available as an extesion for firefox and chrome.
2. Yahoo Yslow - It is available as an extension for both Firefox and chrome to identify the causes and suggestions to optimize the given website.
GZIP
GZip is a method to compress the pages sent to the client by the server. The compression makes the server side work harder, but the compression is effective, and makes the pages much smaller. Enable this option by entering the global configuration in the server tab. In this tab, enable the option for Gzip Page Compression. If the option is not enabled, your Apache server should support it. Consult your hosting service.