Explosive growth of wireless communications, microwave sensors, bio-medical, radars demand multitude of new antenna designs over the past decade. Extensive use of antennas for GPS, Satellite phones, Navigation systems have been recently seen, that requires increased bandwidth, miniature size and circular polarization having better AR performance. Conventional microstrip antennas, in general have the attractive features of low profile, easy fabrication; but due to narrow bandwidth and relatively large size for UHF frequencies, enhancement in bandwidth and size reduction are becoming major design considerations for practical applications of microstrip antennas. Thus over the past several years significant progress have been reported in the design of microstrip antennas with broadband, compactness, circularly polarized and gain-enhanced operations.. However bandwidth improvement results into enlarge size; whereas the miniaturization reduces impedance bandwidth, gain and efficiency; the disadvantage of circularly polarized MSA is limited AR, impedance bandwidth. Hence there is a need of selection of appropriate techniques to achieve the desired characteristics. This paper is a review of various techniques applied for improving bandwidth and compactness of microstrip patches. These include various modified patch shapes, multiresonator (planar and multilayered) configurations, array configurations, size reduction techniques, photonic band gap structures. The paper analyzes different designs in terms of VSWR, AR, Impedance, Gain, Radiation pattern and suggests few optimum design techniques to achieve broadband and compactness. Also various results reported in the literature are discussed and compared.