Google has been obsessed with speeding up the web for quite a while now. The company’s most recent efforts towards this goal include Google Instant for speeding up search, the Page Speed tool for developers and webmasters and the more low-level SPDY protocol which augments the HTTP standard.
Today, Google is also introducing mod_pagespeed, a newmodule for Apache, the open-source Web server that runs most of the world’s websites. This new module includes more than 15 on-the-fly optimizations that can reduce page load times by up to 50%.
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While most small businesses and Internet users with personal sites don’t have access to their low-level server configurations, chances are that a lot of web hosts will implement this feature if it really turns out to be as useful as Google claims it is. Google is already working with web hosts like Go Daddy to bring these optimizations to its customers. Cotendo, a popular content delivery network, also plans to implement this new module. Among other things, mod_pagespeed optimizes caching, minimizes payload sizes and reduces the number of client-server round trips.
There are, of course, business reasons behind Google’s obsession with speed. At the end of the day, if pages load faster, more Internet users are likely to see more of Google’s ads and recent research has shown that people are likely to just move on if your site doesn’t load within 2 seconds.
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