Google just released the first stable version of mod_pagespeed, the company’s open-source module for Apache that can automatically optimize your web pages to improve download and rendering speeds. With this release, Google is declaring this tool ready for broader adoption, though it’s worth noting that a number of large hosting providers like DreamHost, Go Daddy and content delivery network EdgeCast have already been using it in production for quite a while now.
Mod_pagespeed is one of Google’s many initiatives to make the web faster. The module applies up to 40 different optimization filters. It can, for example, optimize your images by compressing and resizing them automatically. Other optimizations include domain sharing and rewriting, CSS and JavaScript concatenation and minification, as well as deferred loading of images and JavaScript.
The company introduced the module in late 2010 and has been working on it ever since. Using mod-pagespeed, Google says, can often halve the download times for larger websites. According to Google, mod_pagespeed currently powers about 120,000 sites.
As PageSpeed team members Joshua Marantz and Ilya Grigorik also note in today’s announcement, ” page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores,” so online publishers who want to rank well on Google’s search results pages should probably give it a try.
With PageSpeed Service, by the way, Google also offers what is essentially a mix of a Google-hosted CDN network that also uses mod_pagespeed to optimize the web pages it serves. PageSpeed Service, however, is currently invite-only.
If you have an hour to kill, here is a deep dive into the intricacies of mod_pagespeed:
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps, YouTube, and Google+, the company’s extension into the social space. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing...
The Apache Software Foundation provides support for the Apache community of open-source software projects. The Apache projects are characterized by a collaborative, consensus based development process, an open and pragmatic software license, and a desire to create high quality software that leads the way in its field.
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