Turbocharge Apache with mod_pagespeed from Google

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Apache Mod PageSpeed

The Dream

Imagine that with just few clicks you could speed up your slow website - sounds very tempting but is it really possible? Trust me it is! Sounds like I am trying to sell magical cure for hangover or German used diesel car with 50000 km which was driven by old grandpa only to church and back.

The Reality

Reality is quite simple - Google made a really good work to implement websites performance best practices into one piece of software which is really easy to use. Of course what Google prepared is well known for all website coders and geeks. For normal people who prefer to click and forget this is very useful. You can read more about website best practices https://developers.google.com/speed/docs/insights/rules.

What to do master - teach me!

Hold your horses young padawan. Here are prerequisites you need to fulfill:

Nonstandard httpd config files

Important notice for servers with non-standard configuration files. If for any reason your httpd config is located in different location for example in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf (rather than in /etc/httpd/conf.d/)

Then you need to load mod_pagesped by modifying /etc/httpd/conf/extra/httpd-includes.conf by this: Include /etc/httpd/conf.d/pagespeed.conf

After you loaded mod_pagespeed check if it is loaded correctly (in CentOS apachectl -M) and now it is time to configure goodies.

I will share optimizations I enabled on my webserver:

#Images
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_images
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters insert_img_dimensions
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters convert_gif_to_png
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters convert_jpeg_to_progressive
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters jpeg_subsampling
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters recompress_jpeg
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters recompress_png
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters recompress_webp
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters strip_image_color_profile
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters strip_image_meta_data
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters sprite_images
#CSS 
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters move_css_above_scripts
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters outline_css
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_css
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters inline_css
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters combine_css
#JavaScript
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters rewrite_javascript
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters defer_javascript
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters inline_javascript
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters outline_javascript
#Cache
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters extend_cache
#Others
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_quotes
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters collapse_whitespace,elide_attributes
    ModPagespeedEnableFilters remove_comments
#Domain
    ModPagespeedDomain https://www.wojcieh.net

After that overall speed of website is very fast. It is not only personal feeling but tests like Pingdom Tools, Google PageSpeed Insights, Yslow also confirm that. I hope you will at least try it - it will not harm you, it will not take long to implement - but trust me results are incredible and you will not regret it.

Documentation is located here http://code.google.com/p/modpagespeed/