Google announced a new module to help speed up sites on Apache HTTP Server yesterday called mod_pagespeed. It looks to be a simple way to automatically apply some best practice optimizations as suggested by it Page Speed tool.

Like Google, we at AP are passionate about speeding up web sites for our customers. We think that having a huge name like Google releasing tools in this space brings a lot of validation to our market and raises awareness of the issues and how they can be solved.

By applying these kinds of techniques, page load times can sometimes be reduced by 50% or more. And the great thing about it is that the acceleration process is completely automated on the web server meaning that developer don't have to worry about modifying code which can be time consuming.

Enterprises looking to improve their web performance now have a choice.

• Companies running Apache on one of the supported Linux platforms (currently CentOS and Ubuntu) can evaluate the benefits from the Open Source mod_pagespeed.
• Companies running other platforms or those who prefer an enterprise-scale solution which comes with backing and support a software vendor will continue to look to vendors like Aptimize. Aptimize and their partners like AP can help guide you through the installation and optimization process giving you the reassurance that your site is running as fast as it can be.

Benefits of mod_pagespeed include:

• Optimize Caching by setting URL versioning and setting far-future expires headers and moving inline CSS and JavaScript into external CSS and JS files.
• Minimize Round Trip Times by combining CSS or in-lining small CSS and JS files into the HTML document.
• Minimize Payload Size by collapsing whitespace in HTML, removing comments and quotes, minifying CSS and JavaScript and re-scaling images to its display size and stripping any metadata.

In addition to these Aptimize also has some more advance techniques to boost you speed further.

• Reduce round-trips by combining JavaScript files.
• Reduce round-trips for background CSS images by in-lining them as base64 encoded data into your CSS file.
• Reduce round-trips by combining multiple images into larger mosaic images using CSS sprites.
• Improve page render time by asynchronously loading JavaScript that normally blocks the download of other page elements.
• Reduce data transfer and page render time by lazy loading of images that are 'below the fold' i.e. off the screen until you scroll.

We expect to run some comparisons over the next couple of weeks and report our finding. Stay tuned.

To read the Aptimize views on mod_pagespeed head to their blog here

To find out more about Google mod_pagespeed read here