If you are running a self-hosted version of WordPress or have your static website hosted on an Apache web server, this may interest you but rest all may please skip.

As part of their “Make the Web Faster” initiative, Google has recently released a new module for Apache web server that, they say, may reduce your web page loading times by up to 50% or in other words, it may make your website twice as faster.

The module, known as mod_pagespeed, does several things to improve the page speed. For example, it minimizes your CSS files, drops all the comments and unnecessary whitespaces from your HTML pages and it reduces the size of images by stripping metadata among other things.

I have been testing this module on my two sites – labnol.org and digitalinspiration.com – and looks like the server-side optimizations performed by the module did help in bringing down the overall page load time though not very significantly.

Google is apparently working to integrate the mod_pagespeed module for all sites hosted on GoDaddy but if your web host is DreamHost, you can enable the module immediately as explained in the following video:

Go to your Dreamhost Control panel – > Manage Domains and click Edit under the domain for which you would like to enable the mod_pagespeed module. Click the checkbox under “Page Speed Optimization,” save the changes and this should be enabled for your website in the next 5 or 10 minutes.

Shawn from the mod_pagespeed dev-team recommends that you should check your site after activating this to make sure that the changes don’t break anything.

We’ve run extensive testing, but we have already seen some bugs in javascript and css minification and collapse_whitespace has been known to cause minor formatting changes.

Related: Measure your Site Speed Online