14 DAY TRIAL // Google has been working on speeding up the web for years now. It does this with its own products, but also with technology it's making available to others. The mod_pagespeed module for the Apache web server is one of those technologies.
As the name suggests, mod_pagespeed has one thing in mind, speed, and it's now more useful than ever, since it's officially out of beta.
It's been thoroughly tested so developers should feel safe installing it knowing things are unlikely to go horribly wrong.
Mod_pagespeed has been around since 2010, but it took this long to polish it to the level of it not needing a beta label anymore.
"After almost two years and eighteen releases, we are announcing that we are taking off the Beta label," Google announced.
"We’re committed to working with the open-source community to continue evolving mod_pagespeed, including more, better and smarter optimizations and support for other web servers," Google explained.
"Over 120,000 sites are already using mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages using the latest techniques and trends in optimization," it added.
Many developers have installed the module for themselves, but most people running a site don't have access to the web server underneath, at least not enough for them to be able to change the configuration or install additional modules.
This is why it's important for hosting providers to have mod_pagespeed installed and Google says plenty of big names have already done so. All of this happened during the beta, so adoption should be even larger now.
"Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. In fact, page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores," Google explained why mod_pagespeed is needed and desirable.
