Don’t you get angry when you see your website loading slower and slower? Do you want to change your hosting provider for a better one, but you don’t have enough money for a VPS (Virtual Private Server) or a dedicated server? Well, Google created two solutions for you.

A while ago, they launched a Firebug plugin: PageSpeed. This plugin helps a lot in optimizing a website under development (to limit HTTP requests, compress images, minify CSS and Javascript). As you may know, a site’s loading speed affects, in a positive or negative way, its position in Google rankings. Even if a website is full of unique, relevant content (Google likes this), but takes more than 10-15 seconds to load, no matter where your visitors came from, that website will never be visible on Google’s first page!

Google mod_pagespeed

This is why Google makes another step forward and introduces a new Apache module called “mod_pagespeed”. This new module allows twice faster loading, sometimes even more. It includes more than 15 optimization techniques including: website global performance increase, logos and images caching extended to 365 days, images recompression but still allowing the site owner to change them at anytime, decreasing the number of HTTP requests between client and server.

Instead of hiring a system administrator to do these tasks manually without any success warranty, mod_pagespeed does this automatically and instantly after activation.

Another very important thing is that Google mod_pagespeed is an OpenSource module, which means that anyone can read or modify the source code. I’ve read on some different opinions regarding this module, like “it will send informations back to Google about my website”. This could be true, if the module would only be provided in a compiled version, or require some sort of license or activation from Google to be able to use it. But it doesn’t. Anyway, Google knows everything about every site online, so what’s left?

Google mod_pagespeed has been successfully tested on webservers using Apache 2.2+ and Debian, CentOS, RedHat, and some other Linux distros (Ubuntu 8+, Fedora, etc). And because it is an OpenSource software, anyone can download the source files and compile them on any platform. If your website is on a shared hosting environment, contact your hosting provider, and tell them about Google mod_pagespeed.

GoDaddy accepted Google’s proposal to integrate Google mod_pagespeed for its millions of users, worldwide. Even Cotendo, one of the biggest CDN (Content Delivery Network) providers, published some news about their partnership with Google.

Useful links:
mod_pagespeed on Google Code
Official Announcement on Google Webmaster Blog
mod_pagespeed Video Demonstration