Google’s Page Speed Service can rewrite your site, make it faster
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Google wants to make the web faster and its willing to rewrite your website to do it.
On Thursday, Ram Ramani, an engineer on Google’s Make the Web Faster team in Bangalore, India, announced the company’s Page Speed Service, which he said can result in websites loading 25% to 60% faster than normal.
‘To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google,’ Ramani said in a Google blog post. ‘Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying Web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google’s servers across the globe.
‘Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other Web performance best practices.’
Google has built a website, WebPageTest.org, where anyone can type in a URL and Google will offer up a measurement of how much faster a website could load if its owner were to use Page Speed Service.
This isn’t Google’s first attempt to make the Web a quicker-loading place.
‘Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their Web pages faster,’ Ramani said. ‘Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite Web pages.’
For now, Page Speed Service is being offered only to a limited number (Google hasn’t said how limited) of websites for free -- interested webmasters can apply online to be free testers, he said.
Eventually, Ramani said, Page Speed Service will be available to everyone and won’t be free. ‘Pricing will be competitive, and details will be made available later,’ Ramani said.
Google hasn’t yet said, but it’s possible that the service would also incur a fee for the tech giant hosting a user’s website. That could beef up Google’s Web hosting business -- a business in which Amazon.com is currently the dominant player.
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-- Nathan Olivarez-Giles
Image: A screen shot of a comparison showing how much faster Google’s Page Speed Service can make a website as conducted by Google’s WebPageTest.org (in this case, not too much faster). Credit: Google