Most of the time  user having  problem of slowness of website  or not optimize server configuration , so performance analyzing websites showing some recommendation like disable etag , add expire header and compression of text etc.. Here i am explaining how we can enable or disable these modules through .htaccess

Unset or Disable ETag 

ETags label is used  in server to figure out the component of browser’s is matched with the server where it is originated  . Lots of website performance tools like YSlow or Yahoo Performance rules ,  suggest to disable Etags will make page load fast and reduce resource utilization like bandwidth. If you are running  multiple server behind load-balanced server with apache webserver then  we should disable Etag generation because etag mechanism use inodes which will be different on different on multiple server for individual website.

Follow below steps to disable Etags.

(1) Go to the document root of website and Edit the .htacess file through vim editior.

# vim .htacess

(2) Add below lines of code in .htaccess file.

Header unset ETag

FileETag None

(3) Save and Exit from vim editor

: wq

Now test the performance .

Compress Files 

Compression of file like CSS,Javascript or html provided by apache module mod_deflate.This module will default install on apache webserver. Here in  my another article for check mod_deflate module is installed or not. To enable compress add below lines in .htaccess file.

#SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

and If you do not want to compress all files , you can mention specific file extension like below in .htaccess

<FilesMatch ".(css| js||html|xml|htm|php)$">

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE

</FilesMatch>

Add Expires Headers Time 

The Expires header is utilized by the proxies or caches client  to figure out if or not it even needs to make a request to the server by any means. The closer you are to the Expires date, the more probable it is the client will make a HTTP ask for that record from the server.

There are lot  of method to add expires header time thorugh .htaccess. Here i am adding basis rules.You can add Expires time thorugh below method.

Header set Expires "Fri, 23 Oct 2025  00:00:00 EST"

If you want to add expires headers for some file types only, use the following code:

<FilesMatch ".(js|ico|jpg|jpeg|png|gif|swf|css)$">

Header set Expires "Fri,23 Oct 2025 00:00:00 EST"

</FilesMatch>

Thanks for reading post , if you have any query you can ask in comments

By Sachin G

I am a professional freelance contributor and founder of tech transit. Love to write and lover of education, culture, and community. I have been using it, setting, supporting, and maintaining it since 2009.Linux rocks! Sachin G Follow me on LinkedIn and x formerly twitter