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Google PageSpeed Module

PageSpeed speeds up your site and reduces page load time. This open-source webserver module automatically applies web performance best practices to pages and associated assets (CSS, JavaScript, images) without requiring that you modify your existing content or workflow. Features:

  • Image Optimization (Compression and Resizing)
  • CSS & JavaScript Concatenation, Minification, and Inlining
  • Asset Caching
  • Deferred Loading of JavaScript and Images
  • Removal of HTML Comments and Whitespace
  • Lazy-loading Images (only loaded when they become visible in the viewport)

Supported platforms

  • CentOS/Fedora (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Debian/Ubuntu (32-bit and 64-bit)
  • Apache 2.2 and greater

Notes

If you get the warning: httpd >= 2.2 is needed by mod-pagespeed-* and you do have the required version installed your installation of Apache httpd is probably not from the system’s package manager. So the mod_pagespeed RPM package won’t work for your system without some work. It will install mod_pagespeed into the wrong location.

So the warning you are getting is perhaps not giving you all the information it could, but it’s helping to prevent you from installing mod_pagespeed on your system where it wouldn’t otherwise work. When you have an Apache httpd install that isn’t package-managed, the easiest way to install mod_pagespeed is to compile it yourself from source.

The mod_pagespeed packages install two versions of the mod_pagespeed code itself, mod_pagespeed.so for Apache 2.2 and mod_pagespeed_ap24.so for Apache 2.4. By default PageSpeed installs itself for the entire server including all VirtualHosts (Apache) or server blocks (Nginx). Created files during installation:

  • pagespeed.conf (/etc/apache2/mods-available or /etc/httpd/conf.d)
  • pagespeed_libraries.conf (/etc/apache2/conf.d)
  • pagespeed.load (Debian only /etc/apache2/conf.d)
  • mod_pagespeed cron script for checking and installing latest updates (/etc/cron.daily/mod-pagespeed)
  • /var/cache/mod_pagespeed (must exist and be writable by the apache user)

When you get error like ‘403 Forbidden when accessing pagespeed pagespeed_console and mod_pagespeed_statistics’  you have to add your ip address like:

<Location /mod_pagespeed_statistics>
    Order allow,deny
    # You may insert other "Allow from" lines to add hosts you want to allow to look at generated statistics.
    Allow from localhost
    Allow from 127.0.0.1
    Allow from YOUR_IP_ADDRESS_HERE
    SetHandler mod_pagespeed_statistics
</Location>

When developing web pages with PageSpeed enabled, it is sometimes convenient to flush the cache of a running server, in order to get the system to reload CSS or JavaScript files that have been updated before the origin cache lifetime expires.

touch /var/cache/mod_pagespeed/cache.flush

Installation

CentOS / Fedora
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-stable_current_x86_64.rpm
sudo yum install at  # if you do not already have 'at' installed
sudo rpm -U mod-pagespeed-stable_current_x86_64.rpm

Debian / ubuntu
wget https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/linux/direct/mod-pagespeed-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo dpkg -i mod-pagespeed-stable_current_amd64.deb
sudo apt-get -f install

Basic Settings

ModPagespeed on / off # Turn the module on or off

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