Compressing and decompressing data

In today's age of bloated websites and daily new web frameworks, many sites feel way more sluggish than they used (and ought) to. One way to mitigate this is by compressing your resources before sending them and then decompressing them when received. This has become the (often ignored) standard on the web. For this purpose, this recipe will teach you how to compress and decompress any kind of data with different algorithms.