Google PageSpeed Service Alternatives
Google announced the turndown of their PageSpeed Service and now is the time to look into alternative solutions. There are two reasonable alternatives to the PageSpeed Service.
After 4.5 years of service, the PageSpeed Service team regretfully decided that the time had come to re-focus their efforts elsewhere and on 5th May announced that PageSpeed Service will be turned down. If you are using PageSpeed Service, you must change your DNS before 3rd August 2015 or your site(s) will become completely unavailable on that date.
The two options are to either install the PageSpeed module on your server or to use a task automation system that does the optimization for you.
PageSpeed module for your origin server
Server side modules of PageSpeed are available for many common web servers. Installing the appropriate module on your origin server allows you to utilize the full feature set of PageSpeed.
- Apache: The mod_pagespeed module is a pre-built binary for Apache 2.2 and 2.4.
- Nginx: The PageSpeed plugin for Nginx can be compiled and loaded into an Nginx server.
- IIS: A commercial port of PageSpeed from IIS WebSpeed is available for Microsoft's IIS web server.
- OpenLiteSpeed: The PageSpeed module for OpenLiteSpeed can be compiled and loaded into an OpenLiteSpeed server.
Minify your assets with a task runner
We recommend that you use Grunt or Gulp to minify and compress your assets when you actually build your web project. Grunt and Gulp are great task automation systems that differentiate mainly in their semantic.
- Grunt: Configuration based approach
- Gulp: Stream based task system
Grunt plugins
The following Grunt plugins can help compress and minify your assets:
- Concat CSS, JS, and HTML: grunt-contrib-concat
- Minify CSS: grunt-contrib-cssmin
- Minify JS: grunt-contrib-uglify
- Minify images: grunt-contrib-imagemin
- Purge cached files: grunt-keycdn
There is even a nice plugin called grunt-pagespeed to get the PageSpeed insight. Not familiar with Grunt? Check this getting started guide.
Gulp plugins
The following Gulp plugins can help compress and minify your assets:
- Concat CSS, JS, and HTML: gulp-concat
- Minify CSS: gulp-minify-css
- Minify JS: gulp-uglify
- Minify images: gulp-imagemin
- Purge cached files: gulp-keycdn
Never used Gulp before? This getting started guide is helpful.