The team behind mod_pagespeed.

mod_pagespeed was an open-source server-side optimization framework originally built and released by Google in 2010. The original team — Joshua Marantz, Jeff Kaufman, Maks Orlovich, Bryan McQuade and others — shipped an Apache module that did things the rest of the web hadn't figured out yet: server-side image transcoding, critical-CSS inlining, cache-extension, JS minification, dozens of transforms across a content pipeline that thousands of operators put in front of production traffic.

It set the standard. It's no longer actively developed upstream — Google moved the project to the Apache Incubator in 2017, and the podling retired in 2023. The optimization libraries from the original mod_pagespeed are the shared core of both parts. The mod_pagespeed 2.1 module carries the proven line forward in-process on Apache, nginx and IIS; the 2.0 re-architecture wrapped the same rewriters in a worker and cache architecture, and that worker is the other part. The rewriters that decide how to compress an image or rewrite a stylesheet are the ones the original team built and proved.

We-Amp B.V. is a Dutch private limited company, registered at the KvK under 57898138, founded in Castricum in 2012. The specialty has always been web performance: image optimization, content rewriting, cache architecture, the boring infrastructure that decides whether a page is fast or slow.

Today We-Amp is led by Otto van der Schaaf, an Apache PageSpeed (incubating) committer and Apache Traffic Server PMC member who helped build ngx_pagespeed and drove the project's Apache incubation. After the podling retired and upstream went quiet, We-Amp carried the lineage forward. The codebase has shipped optimization code since Google's first release in 2010, and We-Amp has worked on it since 2012, across Apache, nginx, Envoy and IIS ports of the 1.x line. The 2.0 re-architecture was We-Amp's independent rebuild, and mod_pagespeed 2.1 brings it together with the module as one product: one shared optimization core, one Cyclone Cache library underneath both parts.

Self-hosted software fits the way we work: you run the binary on your infrastructure, you control the upgrade timing, we don't sit in your request path.

Inside the binary: small LightGBM models — one per format, JPEG, WebP, AVIF — predict the encoder quality that hits a target SSIMULACRA2 perceptual score. Compiled to C through TL2cgen, around five microseconds per call. No model downloads, no runtime dependency, no outbound call in the request path. Every variant is verified against the original with SSIMULACRA2 before it reaches your cache. Don't want it? --no-learned-quality-jpeg, --no-learned-quality-webp, --no-learned-quality-avif. Per format.

Outside the binary: agents watch security advisories, performance research and upstream changes, and brief the team. A human approves before anything user-visible ships. No release goes out without that sign-off.

The 2026 web is HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, container orchestration, nginx in front of nearly everything, AVIF in every browser worth optimizing for. The performance story is no longer "the network is slow" — it's "your origin is doing too much work and shipping too many bytes." Server-side optimization should live next to your origin, not in someone else's data center two hops away.

mod_pagespeed 2.1 reflects that reality. The module serves and the optimizer worker optimizes; with the Apache module and in the reverse-proxy deployment they talk over a local socket, and neither phones home with request data. There is no third-party proxy in the path. There is no CDN dependency. It makes no outbound request of its own accord — the only egress is what the operator configures.

Operators in 2026 have absorbed the trade-offs of edge platforms and managed services, and a growing number want some things back on their own boxes.