Last week Ram Ramani, a member of Google’s ‘Make the Web Faster’ team, announced the release of Google’s ‘page speed service’ in a blog post. The search engine giant has been trying to make the web faster for quite some time and now it seems like it is willing to rewrite the content on your website to increase its speed.
The Page Speed browser extension was released in 2009. This enabled website owners to assess the performance of their web pages based on page speed and to receive recommendations to enhance performance. In 2010, the company released mod_pagespeed, which is an Apache module for automatically rewriting website pages according to web performance best practices. Earlier this year, the Page Speed Online API was launched to simplify the integration of page speed performance analysis into workflow and development tools.
Optimum page load speed is essential for top search engine optimization. Google’s page speed service acquires the content on your site from your server, makes use of web performance best practices to rewrite your pages and serves the pages to web users across the world through its servers. Test results indicate that the service can improve page load speed by 25% to 60%. In order to use this service, you will have to signup and point the DNS entry of your website to Google. At present, only a limited number of websites will be able to take advantage of this service, but eventually, the service will be made available to everyone at a competitive price.
The service may also, at some time in future, start incurring a fee to host a user’s website. Currently Amazon.com is one of the leading players in the web hosting industry, but this move may help Google gain a stronger hold in the sector.