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First off.. Hello to everyone! I work with the mod_pagespeed team at Google, just stumbled over this thread, figured it would be worth answering a few questions that came up...

 


 

^ What is described in the above thread is "PageSpeed Insights", which is our analysis tool. mod_pagespeed is an entirely different project: it optimizes your site content for you, by automatically applying the optimizations recommended by PageSpeed Insights.

 

With that out of the way.. Applying opcode caching, optimizing your SQL queries, etc, are all very important optimizations. Having said that, in practice, many of the bottlenecks in modern applications are in the front-end - that is to say, in loading of CSS, JavaScript, images, and so on. For example, loading this very page requires 55 requests, and consumes 850kb!

 

mod_pagespeed helps automate many of the best practices such as combining JS, CSS files, doing automatic image spriting, etc. In fact, one of the largest and most important optimizations is dynamic image resizing, and re-encoding: the module will resize the image to dimensions specified in the HTML, as well as re-encode png's to JPEG's, or even WebP format (30% savings over JPEG in Chrome and Opera) where applicable. As a site owner, you don't have to do anything to your content, all of this happens within the server.

 

With that in mind.. If you run a tight ship and pay careful attention to all of your resources - good stuff, you may not need mod_pagespeed. But, if you serve a lot of user generated content, themes, or otherwise don't have the time to keep up with all the latest browser perf techniques.. that's where mod_pagespeed can help.


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