The first one you need to enable in your web server. With Apache for example you'd enable mod_deflate (procedure for that depends on your operating system) and add something like the following to the .htaccess file in your Q2A directory:
<IfModule mod_deflate.c>
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/javascript
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain
AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml
</IfModule>
Then restart the web server service.
For the second one you'll first have to find out what actually takes so long when loading the page. Open the developer tools of your browser (in Firefox or Chrome by pressing <F12>), go to the "Network" tab, select "all" and disable caching. Then reload the page and check the load times of the page elements to identify the culprit.