Optimizing for Bandwidth on Apache and Nginx

Thursday, September 04, 2014

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 server¹,
turn on
Optimize for Bandwidth in your configuration, and PageSpeed will do the rest.

If you later decide you’re interested in PageSpeed’s more advanced optimizations, from
cache extension
and
inlining
to the more aggressive
image lazyloading
and
defer JavaScript,
it’s just a matter of enabling them in your PageSpeed configuration.

Learn more about
installing PageSpeed or
enabling Optimize for Bandwidth.

Posted by Jeff Kaufman, Make the Web Fast

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.