Measuring Website Speed: Google's Page Speed Service

Website performance has been a factor in Google ranking for some time now. Long loading times due to extensive scripts and large file sizes should be avoided. Google offers webmasters an overview of the development of website performance in the Webmaster Tools. In addition, there is PageSpeed as a browser add-on. Recently, Google also introduced the Page Speed Service.

The online service Page Speed is designed to automatically speed up the loading of the website by up to 60%. To achieve this, the service rewrites pages "considering best practices" and makes them available to website visitors via Google servers. Measures include linking CSS files, caching, image, and gzip compression.

To use the Page Speed Service, the following steps must be performed: After entering and verifying the website to be optimized, a preview of the accelerated page is displayed to give an overview of the future result. Subsequently, a reference domain (for example, as a subdomain ref.domain.com) must be set up for Page Speed from which the service retrieves the IP address for the original content. The final step is to create a CNAME record.

In the dashboard, traffic and changes can finally be monitored. HTTP errors are also displayed here. Pages on which Page Speed causes errors can be blacklisted and excluded from the service. This can be found in the Rewriter Settings, where the settings for the various rewrite options can also be enabled and disabled. In addition, caching can be set individually through the Cache menu item.

However, the Page Speed Service does not support all content and websites. HTTPS pages, Flash elements, audio and video streams are currently not supported. Google suggests moving corresponding content to a subdomain that Page Speed does not access. Image files are optimized but may lose their previous path through the rewriting process. According to Google's statement, this can temporarily affect ranking in image search, so caution is advised here.

Currently, the new service is only accessible to a limited group of webmasters. Those who want to use the Page Speed Service must register using a form by providing their email address and their own URL as well as daily page views, and will then be informed when the service is available to all webmasters. Until then, the Webpage Test gives a small preview of what will be possible with the new service. After specifying a URL, it is analyzed and then its loading time before and after optimization by Page Speed is displayed.

For the small group of initial users, the service is offered free of charge; later, the service will be offered for a fee. Pricing models for this will be published at a later date.