Nearly two years ago, Google unveiled mod_pagespeed, an open source Apache module tool for developers to help make the web faster. Today, Google announced that it has left beta status. It has gone through eighteen different releases to get here.

“We’re committed to working with the open-source community to continue evolving mod_pagespeed, including more, better and smarter optimizations and support for other web servers,” Joshua Marantz and Ilya Grigorik of Google’s PageSpeed Team say in a joint blog post on the Webmaster Central blog. “Over 120,000 sites are already using mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages using the latest techniques and trends in optimization. The product is used worldwide by individual sites, and is also offered by hosting providers, such as DreamHost, Go Daddy and content delivery networks like EdgeCast. With the move out of beta we hope that even more sites will soon benefit from the web performance improvements offered through mod_pagespeed.”

Here’s an hour-long discussion about mod_pagespeed:

“mod_pagespeed is a key part of our goal to help make the web faster for everyone,” the pair adds. “Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. In fact, page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores. Besides evangelizing for speed, we offer tools and technologies to help measure, quantify, and improve performance, such as Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and PageSpeed Optimization products. In fact, both mod_pagespeed and PageSpeed Service are based on our open-source PageSpeed Optimization Libraries project, and are important ways in which we help websites take advantage of the latest performance best practices.”

Emphasis added.