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