Adding a prominent feather to its hat, Google released the first stable version of its speed optimising module mod_pagespeed. mod_pagespeed is an Apache module designed to automatically apply a number of performance best practices to webpages, making them considerably faster. It was rolled out in beta back in late 2010, and since then has seen 18 beta releases before finally making it to a stable version.
According to Google, mod_pagespeed is currently used by more than 1,20,000 websites. Some hosting providers such as Godaddy, DreamHost and CDNs like EdgeCast have been offering it to their users for a while now. With the stable version out, Google expects greater adoption in the upcoming months.
mod_pagespeed is a natural step forward in Google’s endeavour to make the web faster and more optimised. mod_pagespeed allows you to concentrate on your project development issues, while ensuring that the optimisation part is automatically handled by it. It improves web page latency and bandwidth usage by changing the resources on that web page to implement web performance best practices.
The module applies up to 40 different optimisation filters. Each optimisation is implemented as a custom filter in mod_pagespeed, which is executed when the Apache HTTP server serves the website assets. The optimisations include combining and minifying JavaScript and CSS files, inlining small resources, and others. mod_pagespeed also dynamically optimises 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.
According to Joshua Marantz and Ilya Grigorik of Google’s PageSpeed Team, users prefer faster sites and faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. They added that page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores as well. This indicates the number of advantages that mod_pagespeed can bring to your websites. By using it in your projects, you not only make sure that your websites are optimised, but there is a good chance that your sites might get ranked higher in the search results as well.
If you have an hour to spare and you are interested in exploring more about mod_pagespeed, you can watch the following video to learn how it’s making the web faster and more optimised:
