It is very important to turn on caching and compression in your web server to improve the overall feel of your site. Not to mention that the biggest Search Engine in the world now considers your page speed when ranking it. So, quite simply add the following to apache which will turn on caching and compression for everything. You might want to tweak the text/html setting or even remove it completely if you have a site that is being updated all the time.
<Location />
# CACHING with MOD_EXPIRES
# Set expire time for files by mime type
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html "access plus 1 hour"
ExpiresByType text/css "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/javascript "access plus 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access plus 1 year"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access plus 1 month"
# COMPRESSION with MOD_DEFLATE
# Insert filter
SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4 gzip-only-text/html
BrowserMatch ^Mozilla/4\.0[678] no-gzip
BrowserMatch \bMSI[E] !no-gzip !gzip-only-text/html
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \
\.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary
Header append Vary User-Agent env=!dont-vary
</Location>
