Make your websites run faster, automatically — try mod_pagespeed for Apache
Webmaster Level: All
Last year, as part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, we introduced Page Speed, a tool that gives developers suggestions to speed up web pages. It’s usually pretty straightforward for developers and webmasters to implement these suggestions by updating their web server configuration, HTML, JavaScript, CSS and images. But we thought we could make it even easier — ideally these optimizations should happen with minimal developer and webmaster effort.
So today, we’re introducing a module for the Apache HTTP Server called mod_pagespeed to perform many speed optimizations automatically. We’re starting with more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that address various aspects of web performance, including optimizing caching, minimizing client-server round trips and minimizing payload size. We’ve seen mod_pagespeed reduce page load times by up to 50% (an average across a rough sample of sites we tried) — in other words, essentially speeding up websites by about 2x, and sometimes even faster.
Here are a few simple optimizations that are a pain to do manually, but that mod_pagespeed excels at:
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How to Speed up WordPress
At Pubcon this year Google announced page load time was going to become a ranking factor in 2010 (see video below). Shortly after this announcement, Google started showing load time data in webmaster central. Being a bit proactive, I decided to start looking at ways to speed up this site.
Introducing Page Speed
At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user’s experience and helps them become more productive. Today, we want to share with the web community some of the best practices we’ve used and developed over the years, by open-sourcing Page Speed.
