Google has a plenty of free service, from searching to analytics, from speed testing to optimization. Google PageSpeed Insights is an initiative by Google, which has apparently offered up speed improvements of 25 to 60 percent in its early testing phases. So how it possible? Google grabs content from your servers, rewrites pages with performance best practices, and sends them out through its own servers. The service has raised a few eyebrows, but Google insists that Page Speed Service is all about improving performance, not collecting information for future advertising opportunities.
The importance of fast loading times is big matter in this new world, where web is used to shopping, sharing and enjoyment. Once upon a time web sites were filled with useless clutter that led to painful periods of twiddling thumbs. Flash web sites were particularly problematic, since they usually had to spend a few minutes loading before anything appeared. Nowadays people are much less willing to sit around if a web site doesn’t load quickly enough. Time is precious, and webmasters can easily lose visitors if they ignore page load time problems.
Visit Google PageSpeed Insights
Server response time, is a measure of time taken to load the necessary HTML to begin rendering the page from your server, subtracting out the network latency between Google and your server. There may be variance from one run to the next, but highly variable server response time may indicate an underlying performance issue.
Two years ago Google 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 Google released mod_page speed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, Google is releasing a new service, 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.
How Webpage speed service Works
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.The service works by fetching web sites through Google’s servers, automatically rewriting them using web performance best practices and then running them back through Google’s servers to the end user. While it sounds like more work is involved, the rewriting can mean hugely decreased loading times thanks to automatically concatenating the CSS, compressing images, caching, and gzipping resources, all of which can be a pain to do manually but help deliver online content much faster.
Google said it encountered improvements of between 25 per cent and 60 per cent on many sites in its tests. Google has a handy online test to give people an idea of how much of an improvement they will see when using Page Speed Service. We tested the link for Coolefriend.com (see the results below) and were offered a page load time improvement of only 40.5 per cent. Obviously the difference depends on how well optimized a web site is in the first place.
Currently to use the service, webmasters need to sign up and point the site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed 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.Though Google is offering the service free of charge to a select number of webmasters initially, it will charge a fee once it launches the service. The Web search giant is working to speed up site load times for the last two years and the latest project is another step towards enabling faster browsing. Google claims that the optimization will happen in the real time.
Test Web speed with webpage speed service
Request page speed service
Page Speed Service is currently being offered to a limited set of webmasters. If you wish to speed up your website, you need to fill a form and your account will be enabled as the service is rolled out broadly. During the period of limited availability, Google are unable to respond to all requests, and will get back only if Google enable your account.
Request page speed service form
How to use the service
- You sign up and provide Google with your serving and reference domains.
- You send traffic to Page Speed Service by pointing your DNS CNAME entry to
ghs.google.com.
Google serves requests received for your serving domain by fetching content from your reference domain and rewriting it.
Read more about how Google measure speed up
What is Page Speed Online?
Page Speed Online analyzes the content of a web page, then generates suggestions to make that page faster. Reducing page load times can reduce bounce rates and increase conversion rates.
http://pagespeed.googlelabs.com/
Our Testing results
In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25.5% to 40.5% on our sites. Google shows results similar to Pingdom tools. The results shows when it receives first byte, load time,documents, fully loaded time, etc. The detailed results contains waterfall image, screen shot of page and video. It also shows the content break down, so now optimizing is become so easy.
How we tested
- Go to http://www.webpagetest.org/compare
- Enter the URL of your website, say
www.example.com.- Optional steps:
- Choose the test location and browser. The default is IE8 from US East (Virginia).
- Select More Configurations… for a broader selection of locations, browsers and network connection type. The default connection type is DSL.
- Click the Start Test button.
The test may take several minutes to complete, depending on the load on the test servers. The page will automatically refresh every 30 seconds and display the results when it is complete.
Understanding the results
The test involves rendering your website on the selected browser by directly visiting your site, and repeating the same test by proxying your site through Page Speed Service.In the test above, Page Speed Service loads the site 40.5% faster for the first view, and 25.5% faster for repeat views of the same page. You can click on the Play button (shown as a triangle) under Visual Comparison to view how the page would appear to load to an end user, with and without Page Speed Service.You can click on the view test link in each column to see more details about the test run. The Page Speed Score and grades for the test run are shown at the right top corner of the page. You can click on the First View and Repeat View links to find out more details on exactly how Page Speed Service improved the loading of your page.
Read more about understanding the results from Google
In Google’s own testing they found a 25% to 60% speed improvements some of the websites that had been tested. If you want to check the speed of your site and want to improve it, check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. Google working on adding more improvements to the service.
Google has published some hacks in its blog to use the page speed service, like one below,
“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.”
