I’m working on a WordPress site which was installed on a fairly slow server so I have to deal with even the slightest speed issues I find. The first thing I’ve tried was W3 Total Cache which is rather a bloatware than a performance optimization plugin (It might be good for better hosts but not for most of the shared hosts). Few more cache plugins later I’ve decided to set up the easiest and the fastest cache and compression I can imagine (via htaccess). This article is useful for WordPress owners but also for anyone who uses PHP and Apache.