Make your website faster with mod_pagespeed, now out of Beta

If your page is on the web server, speed matters! For web developers, web designer and webmasters, making your page faster shouldn’t be a hassle, which is why Google PageSpeed Team introduced mod_pagespeed in 2010.

Since then the development team has been working to improve the functionality, quality and performance of this open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and their resources. Now, after almost two years and eighteen releases.

Over 120,000 sites are already using mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages using the latest techniques and trends in optimization. The product is used worldwide by individual sites, and is also offered by hosting providers, such as DreamHost, Go Daddy and content delivery networks like EdgeCast. With the move out of beta we hope that even more sites will soon benefit from the web performance improvements offered through mod_pagespeed.

mod_pagespeed is a key part of our goal to help make the web faster for everyone. Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. In fact, page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores. Besides evangelizing for speed, it offer tools and technologies to help measure, quantify, and improve performance, such as Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and PageSpeed Optimization products. In fact, both mod_pagespeed and PageSpeed Service are based on our open-source PageSpeed Optimization Libraries project, and are important ways in which we help websites take advantage of the latest performance best practices.

Apache module mod_pagespeed

How does mod_pagespeed speed up web sites?

mod_pagespeed improves web page latency and bandwidth usage by changing the resources on that web page to implement web performance best practices. Each optimization is implemented as a custom filter in mod_pagespeed, which are executed when the Apache HTTP server serves the website assets. Some filters simply alter the HTML content, and other filters change references to CSS, JavaScript, or images to point to more optimized versions.

mod_pagespeed implements custom optimization strategies for each type of asset referenced by the website, to make them smaller, reduce the loading time, and extend the cache lifetime of each asset. These optimizations include combining and minifying JavaScript and CSS files, inlining small resources, and others. mod_pagespeed also dynamically optimizes images by removing unused meta-data from each file, resizing the images to specified dimensions, and re-encoding images to be served in the most efficient format available to the user.

mod_pagespeed ships with a set of core filters designed to safely optimize the content of your site without affecting the look or behavior of your site. In addition, it provides a number of more advanced filters which can be turned on by the site owner to gain higher performance improvements.

mod_pagespeed can be deployed and customized for individual web sites, wordpress & joomla, as well as being used by large hosting providers and CDN’s to help their users improve performance of their sites, lower the latency of their pages, and decrease bandwidth usage.

Link: To learn more about mod_pagespeed and how to incorporate it in your site, watch our recent Google Developers Live session or visit the mod_pagespeed product page.