Google Data

By Ram Ramani, Engineering Manager

Update 7/29/11: We were notified of a bug in the measurement tool that sometimes causes incorrect measurements. If your results indicated a slowdown on your pages, please run the tests again, and make sure you specify a fully qualified domain such as www.example.com. We apologize for any inconvenience and confusion this may have caused.

Details:
Measurement tests run for bare domains (such as example.com, without the prefix www) previously indicated that pages were loading more slowly, rather than speeding up, when using Page Speed Service. The test results page now prominently notifies you of this when you visit this page, if this error applies to you. Please check your old measurement results page if this bug applies to you. Running the tests again with the fully qualified domain such as www.example.com usually fixes the issue and gives you the correct measurement.

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. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. 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.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You can request access to the service by filling out this web form.

Ram Ramani is an Engineering Manager on the Make the Web Faster Team in Bangalore, India. He is a believer in "Faster is better".

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor