Optimizing for Bandwidth on Apache and Nginx
This post originally appeared on
Webmaster
Central
by Jeff Kaufman, Make the Web Fast
Webmaster level: advanced
Everyone wants to use less bandwidth: hosts want lower bills, mobile users want to stay under
their limits, and no one wants to wait for unnecessary bytes. The web is full of opportunities
to save bandwidth: pages served without gzip, stylesheets and JavaScript served unminified,
and unoptimized images, just to name a few.
So why isn't the web already optimized for bandwidth? If these savings are good for everyone
then why haven't they been fixed yet? Mostly it's just been too much hassle. Web designers are
encouraged to "save for web" when exporting their artwork, but they don't always remember.
JavaScript programmers don't like working with minified code because it makes
debugging harder. You can set up a custom pipeline that makes sure each of these optimizations
is applied to your site every time as part of your development or deployment process, but
that's a lot of work.
An easy solution for web users is to use an optimizing proxy, like
Chrome's.
When users opt into this service their HTTP traffic goes via Google's proxy, which optimizes
their page loads and cuts bandwidth usage by 50%. While this is great for these
users, it's limited to people using Chrome who turn the feature on and it can't optimize HTTPS
traffic.
With
Optimize
for Bandwidth, the PageSpeed team is bringing this same
technology to webmasters so that everyone can benefit: users of other browsers, secure sites,
desktop users, and site owners who want to bring down their outbound traffic bills. Just
install the
PageSpeed
module on your Apache or Nginx server [1],
turn
on Optimize for Bandwidth in your configuration, and PageSpeed
will do the rest.
[1] If you're using a different web server, consider running PageSpeed on an Apache or Nginx
proxy. And it's all
open source, with
porting efforts underway for
IIS,
ATS,
and others.
Posted by
Mano Marks, Google
Developer Platform Team
