Everyone knows Google has a long history of releasing products before they’re ready for market and yanking them once they flounder (Google Wave anyone?). Or, just letting them meander along full of flaws (read: Google Places). But today, Google announced that after 2 years and 18 different releases they’re bringing mod_pagespeed out of Beta.  The goal of mod_pagespeed is to bring an open-source solution to the market which helps improve site speed straight out of the box.

What exactly is mod_pagespeed and what does it do?

mod_pagespeed is an open-source Apache server module designed to help websites load faster. (Sorry IIS users, but right now Google is just promising to work with the open-source community on solutions for other web servers.)  In its most basic form, the module is taking the implementation of site speed recommendations and automating them for the website that’s being served to the end-user.

From the mod_pagespeed Product Page:

“mod_pagespeed improves web page latency and bandwidth usage by changing the resources on that web page to implement web performance best practices. Each optimization is implemented as a custom filter in mod_pagespeed, which are executed when the Apache HTTP server serves the website assets. Some filters simply alter the HTML content, and other filters change references to CSS, JavaScript, or images to point to more optimized versions.

mod_pagespeed implements custom optimization strategies for each type of asset referenced by the website, to make them smaller, reduce the loading time, and extend the cache lifetime of each asset. These optimizations include combining and minifying JavaScript and CSS files, inlining small resources, and others. mod_pagespeed also dynamically optimizes images by removing unused meta-data from each file, resizing the images to specified dimensions, and re-encoding images to be served in the most efficient format available to the user.

mod_pagespeed ships with a set of core filters designed to safely optimize the content of your site without affecting the look or behavior of your site. In addition, it provides a number of more advanced filters which can be turned on by the site owner to gain higher performance improvements.”

Basically, Google is attempting to take all of the elements being called out in their PageSpeed Insights and implement fixes to improve the load times of websites.

What does this mean for your site?

First of all, it means that if you’re using an Apache webserver, you have a quick fix for site speed issues.  With site speed affecting everything from organic search rankings to AdWords quality scores, this is excellent news.  In addition to being easy to implement, there are already a number of hosting providers who are offering mod_pagespeed as part of their services.  With the product being tried and tested (remember, 2 years and 18 releases) it’s an excellent quick-fix for your site speed issues.

For more information on the release, what it means and how it works, check out the official video from Google.

Make the Web Fast: Automagic site optimization with mod_pagespeed 1.0!