Installing Google PageSpeed module on Apache and Nginx

Google PageSpeed module is an open source server module that can optimise your web server automagically.
It can do things some cool things like:

• Collapse Whitespace
• Combine CSS
• Combine JavaScript
• Defer JavaScript
• Inline CSS & JS
• Lazily Load Images
• Make Images Responsive
• Optimize Images
• Remove Comments

See https://modpagespeed.com/doc/ for full documentation.

For Example, if we wanted to lazily load images we simply add

For Apache

ModPagespeedEnableFilters lazyload_images

For Nginx

pagespeed EnableFilters lazyload_images;

Architecture

I am installing this on a minimal Linode cloud server running:
– Ubuntu 16.10 Yakkety Yak
– Apache/2.4.18
– Nginx/1.11.10

Installing Apache with mod_pagespeed

sudo apt-get install apache2
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
service apache2 restart

then run

curl -I http://domain-or-ip

and you should see in your headers

X-Page-Speed: 1.11.33.4-0

We are successful! we can stop apache to test nginx on the same port.

service apache2 stop

Installing Nginx with ngx_pagespeed

bash <(curl -f -L -sS https://ngxpagespeed.com/install) --nginx-version latest

Add this to your nginx.conf

pagespeed on;
pagespeed FileCachePath /var/ngx_pagespeed_cache;
location ~ "\.pagespeed\.([a-z]\.)?[a-z]{2}\.[^.]{10}\.[^.]+" {
  add_header "" "";
}
location ~ "^/pagespeed_static/" { }
location ~ "^/ngx_pagespeed_beacon$" { }

Start Nginx

/usr/local/nginx/sbin/nginx

then run

curl -I http://domain-or-ip

and you should see in your headers

X-Page-Speed: 1.11.33.4-0

Go forth and optimize!