Sunday, July 31, 2011

Page Speed Service by Google, Website Optimization Service

Site Speed Optimization Service by Google
Google has launched a new service that promises to speed up people's websites if they point them to its DNS servers by optimization pages and serving them from the company's servers around the world.

Called the Page Speed Service, the new product will be a paid offering with prices yet to be disclosed, but for now the company is accepting beta testers for free.

It is a continuation of Google's efforts to help webmaster optimize their websites. These previously included the Page Speed browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, the Page Speed Online API and the mod_pagespeed Apache module.

The Page Speed Service works by fetching pages from the user's servers, rewriting them according to web performance best practices like compressing images, concatenating CSS, gzipping resources, etc., and serving them from Google's cache servers.

"Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times," said Ram Ramani, engineering manager on Google's Make the Web Faster Team.

The team claims the speed improvements observed so far have been between 25% to 60%, depending on the website, and notes that optimizations are still being added to the service.

"Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later," Ramani said. But in the meantime, interested webmasters can try out for free by requesting access to the service via a web form.

A comparison tool that lets webmasters test their pages in advance of signing up has also been released. However, there is a bug that causes people to actually see slower load times than for the original pages.

This is caused by the use of bare domains like example.com without the www prefix. "Running the tests again with the fully qualified domain such as www.example.com usually fixes the issue and gives you the correct measurement," Google says