Google is offering Web server administrators a newly updated free module that makes the delivery of web pages faster by a number of techniques used to compress content. The module, called PageSpeed, could cut bandwidth usage by a significant amount, noted Mano Marks, a member of the Google developer platform team, who posted a blog item announcing the module update Thursday.

PageSpeed, designed to analyze and optimize Website performance, works with both the Apache and Nginx Web server software. Google says that using a new feature of PageSpeed called "Optimizing For Bandwidth" could reduce bandwidth needed to convey a large Web site by about 37 percent.

The technology is based on software that Google built for its Chrome browser, which the company found cut bandwidth usage by 50 percent.

PageSpeed can work with any browser, and can work in both HTTP and HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer) mode. The software compresses and transcodes images in place, and minimizes JavaScript and CSS automatically.

Administrators can also experiment with PageSpeed's more advanced optimizations, from cache extension and inlining to the more aggressive image lazyloading and defer JavaScript, by enabling them enabling them in their PageSpeed configuration.