Gzip compression used to be a big help in speeding up my Magento sites, however support for the Mod_gzip module ended when my hosting switched from the older Apache 1.3 Web Server to Apache 2.
Introducing mod_deflate module
Mod_deflate is a module for the Apache Web Server, that makes better use of the available bandwidth by compressing content delivered from the web server to the client’s browser. The compression is automatic, with full support provided by most modern browsers.
Speeding up Magento
If Apache is configured with mod_deflate, the content of the file (html/php/js/css etc) will be compressed before being sent to the browser. The browser, then decompresses the file and will display it to the visitor as a simple html file.
Enabling mod_deflate
To enable mod_deflate, you have a .htaccess file in the root of your install with the following code in it:
<IfModule mod_deflate.c> AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css text/csv text/html text/plain text/richtext text/sgml text/tab-separated-values application/javascript application/x-javascript httpd/unix-directory AddOutputFilter DEFLATE html htm shtml php php4 pl rb py cgi css js txt BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip BrowserMatch \bMSIE !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html </IfModule>
.htaccess files work recursively, so it will have effect on all the subdirectories as well.
The .htaccess file above will have mod_deflate enabled for all HTML, SSI, PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python, CGI, Cascading Style Sheets, JavaScript and text files.
Test that your Magento site is compressed
To test that mod_deflate has been enabled enter your site URL at http://www.whatsmyip.org/http-compression-test/
Thanks so much, this worked for me