De Valdez

Over a year ago, Google released a tool called Page Speed which gave simple suggestions to developers interested in speeding up their sites. Typically these suggestions were not too difficult, and if you were already aware of many front-end best practices (as relating to HTML, CSS, and Javascript) you likely implemented such suggestions to begin with, or soon after hearing about this tool. But, some of the recommendations, particularly relating to server configuration may have been too complicated or possibly inaccessible if on a shared hosting environment.

Then there was mod_pagespeed. Google later introduced this Apache HTTP Server module which performs many of the suggested optimizations automatically. Supposedly, the first beta release had over optimized over 15 processes on the fly, which significantly improves overall speed of page delivery. Today, they’ve incorporated more. In extreme cases Google claims to have seen an increase by 50%, which means that the original page was in bad shape… none the less, this module easily reduces everyday annoying tasks into three commands used in one shot.

wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-beta_current_i386.deb

Be sure to exchange the current version for the one you see available here. This command simply brings the package into your server and makes it available for execution and installation.

dpkg -i mod-pagespeed-*.deb

The second command, makes use of the Debian package manager (works on most Ubuntu stacks). Which returns something like this:

Selecting previously deselected package mod-pagespeed-beta.
(Reading database ... 24267 files and directories currently installed.)
Unpacking mod-pagespeed-beta (from mod-pagespeed-beta_current_i386.deb) ...
Setting up mod-pagespeed-beta (0.9.16.9-r576) ...
Enabling module pagespeed.
Run '/etc/init.d/apache2 restart' to activate new configuration!

Follow the last command and you’re done! Visit your sites to see the instant improvement.