Optimize Your Website Automatically With Google’s Apache Module mod_pagespeed

Google’s commitment to performance just grew larger with their release of mod_pagespeed. This Apache module uses 15+ techniques to automatically optimize your site’s performance. These include:

• 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.

The documentation can be found on mod_pagespeed’s Google Code page.

There have been WPO blackboxes for a while that sit at the edge of your network and perform these types of tasks but this is the first Apache module I’m aware of to do so. I’m very interested in seeing real world stats on how well this works. There should be a minor performance hit the first time a page is loaded but the module caches the optimized results. After that first load everything should be significantly faster.

Are there any other free modules / edge tools available like mod_pagespeed?