Caching with .htaccess and Apache will take your website and your web skills to the next level. This is some technical and advanced methods condensed to simple htaccess code examples for you. But you must take the time to understand caching with cache-control and other headers and HTTP options before you implement on a production server.

I found this very useful website with an interesting list of examples of htaccess configurations.

Caching with both mod_expires + mod_headers

# Turn on Expires and set default to 0
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

# Set up caching on media files for 1 year (forever?)

ExpiresDefault A29030400
Header append Cache-Control "public"

# Set up caching on media files for 1 week

ExpiresDefault A604800
Header append Cache-Control "public"

# Set up 2 Hour caching on commonly updated files

ExpiresDefault A7200
Header append Cache-Control "proxy-revalidate"

# Force no caching for dynamic files

ExpiresActive Off
Header set Cache-Control "private, no-cache, no-store, proxy-revalidate, no-transform"
Header set Pragma "no-cache"

Caching with mod_headers

# 1 YEAR

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=29030400, public"

# 1 WEEK

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=604800, public"

# 3 HOUR

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=10800"

# NEVER CACHE

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=0, private, no-store, no-cache, must-revalidate"

Caching with mod_expires

ExpiresActive On
ExpiresDefault A0

# 1 YEAR

ExpiresDefault A29030400

# 1 WEEK

ExpiresDefault A604800

# 3 HOUR

ExpiresDefault A10800"

Turn Gzip Compression On

This goes in your root .htaccess file but if you have access to httpd.conf that is better.

This code uses the FilesMatch directive and the SetOutputFilter DEFLATE directive to only target files ending in .js or .css

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE