Google Rolls Out New Apache Module for Optimizing Web Pages

November 9th, 2010 · No Comments

You can always tell when engineers name a product. Google’s marketing people weren’t consulted when they named their new Apache module “mod_pagespeed”, but despite the clunky name, the utility will be a great addition to webmasters hosting their web sites on Apache web servers.

The new mod_pagespeed tool makes Apache-hosted web sites load up to 50 percent faster. It’s an open source utility, so we’re also looking forward to seeing what the community at large will do to make it even more powerful in the coming months. While there are existing utilities (such as Google’s earlier Page Speed utility) that attempt the same feat, mod_pagespeed has the advantage of optimizing pages automatically. According to Google’s latest announcement on the utility, mod_pagespeed optimizes JavaScript, HTML, and CSS stylesheets, and it can also be used to optimize JPEG and PNG images.

The tool has been tested on both CentOS and Ubuntu, and supports Apache 2.2. To download the utility, check with your web hosting company first. Many hosting companies are already getting on board and will have the utility ready for you to use. If you are hosting your own site, or if your hosting company does not have mod_pagespeed available, you can download it from Google’s web site at http://code.google.com/p/modpagespeed/source/checkout.

The mod_pagespeed utility is part of Google’s “Make the Web Faster” initiative. The speed at which a site loads is always important to web masters-as designers and marketers will tell you, if a site takes more than a few seconds to load, most viewers will quickly abandon the site and move onto something else. And of course, there is the search ranking issue. Google’s own mysterious algorithm that determines your placement in the search ranking includes a lot of things (most of which they don’t tell you), but loading speed is definitely one of the factors. You may be able to move up a notch or two in the search results with this little program.

The utility includes over 15 optimizations that address a cross-section of performance issues. Among these optimizations are optimization of the cache, minimizing client-server round trips, and keeping payload size to a minimum.

Many of the optimizations can be done manually, but the mod_pagespeed utility just makes the whole process easier by automating the process. Google has already been working with hosting company Go Daddy to get mod_pagespeed running for its 8.5 million hosting customers.