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:
•Making changes to the pages built by the Content Management Systems (CMS) with no need to make changes to the CMS itself,
•Recompressing an image when its HTML context changes to serve only the bytes required (typically tedious to optimize manually), and
•Extending the cache lifetime of the logo and images of your website to a year, while still allowing you to update these at any time.