Speed up your sites with PageSpeed for Nginx
By Jeff Kaufman, Software Engineer, Make the Web Faster Team
When
we
released mod_pagespeed in 2010, we gave webmasters a way to speed up their sites
without needing to become web performance optimization experts. As an Apache module, however,
it was unavailable to sites running Nginx, the
popular high performing open
source web server that powers many large web sites. Today that changes: we're releasing
PageSpeed Beta for Nginx, aka
ngx_pagespeed.
Running as a module inside Nginx, ngx_pagespeed rewrites your webpages to make them faster for
your users. This includes compressing images, minifying CSS and JavaScript, extending cache
lifetimes, and many other web performance
best
practices. All of mod_pagespeed's
optimization
filters are now available to Nginx users.
After three months of
alpha testing on hundreds of sites, ngx_pagespeed has proven its ability to serve production
traffic. It's ready for beta, and it's ready for you to
start using it on your
site.
MaxCDN, a content delivery network provider,
recently published a
blog
post on their experience testing ngx_pagespeed: “With PageSpeed enabled, we shaved
1.57 seconds from our average page load, dropped our bounce rate by 1%, and our exit
percentage by 2.5%. In sum, we squeezed out extra performance with nothing but a few extra
lines in our nginx config files... We are continuing to test the module with the PageSpeed
team, and our goal is to make it available across our CDN and to all of our customers – stay
tuned!”
ZippyKid, a popular WordPress hosting
provider, is also one of the
early
beta testers of ngx_pagespeed: “PageSpeed for ZippyKid is the world’s first
WordPress optimization service powered by ngx_pagespeed, designed to automatically apply web
performance best practices to deliver fast WordPress sites. Our benchmarks indicate that
PageSpeed for ZippyKid will deliver up to a 75% reduction in page sizes and a 50% improvement
in page rendering speeds.”
Development of ngx_pagespeed is
open source, with contributions
by developers from
Google,
Taobao,
We-Amp, and many other individual volunteers.
Thanks everyone for helping us reach the Beta milestone!
To start using ngx_pagespeed, follow the installation instructions on
GitHub.
Jeff Kaufman works on PageSpeed, an open-source
server module that helps make the web
faster, and is interested in experiment measurement. He also plays for contra dances, organizes other dances, and blogs about dancing, giving, and tech.
Posted by Scott Knaster,
Editor
