Results: yes. Solutions: no?

[Trois]

First of all: thank you for this tool! Really useful!

However... I see what is wrong with my page/site (http://www.webpagetest.org/result/110701...pagespeed/), but it is extremely difficult to fix things - simply as I can not find related solutions...

What I need is, per error/warning, a link to a solution:
- how do I compress text?
- "compressible resources should have a "Vary: Accept-Encoding" header" - where?
- "Minifying the following HTML" - how?
and....

Maybe this tool is for PhP-developers only? I know HTML and CSS and use PhP to piece my site together - also using . js scripts - but I'm not versed in it, so I need to see examples... Just searching for it results in endless debates among specialists, (too) specific suggestions etc.

I don't have direct access to my server settings, although I could ask my host to change something if it is really hampering - but so far Apache seems ok to me... I want to fix things on the front-end.

I found here this for the .htaccess file (only in the forum, not on the page-speed page itself):

Code:

<FilesMatch "\.(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico|css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31530000"
Header unset Vary
Header unset ETag
FileETag None
</FilesMatch>
<FilesMatch "\.(html|htm|php)$">
Header unset Etag
Header set Cache-control "max-age=600"
Header unset Last-Modified
</FilesMatch>

I'm not even sure what it exactly does, but it helped improve the score... however, I have no idea if it will work once the complete site is up - right now I'm building the framework first - using Blueprint CSS etc.

Also, I tried CDN for jQuery (via Google), but it actually slowed down the loading time, so I now load it locally again.

In general, how good/bad is a 86/100 score: I would think fairly good, but how does it compare to other sites? When is it considered 'acceptable'; is 100 realistic or is say 95 the highest ever reached?

Anyway, thanks again - great tool, but I could use some better hands-on solutions - any help is welcome!