Google starts rolling out Page Speed Service

Today we are here to introduce you with Google’s effort to make the whole web faster than ever. By saying “Faster Web” we mean “fast loading web pages” and as we know, site speed is an important ranking factor in Google’s search engine algorithm starting early April, 2010.
Google also released a small tool called Page Speed as an add-on to Firefox Firebug extension that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement. When Site speed was introduced as a ranking factor, it didn’t carry much weight, but now Google is pushing speed as an important factor in search ranking’s and as we know how much our business depends on the search ranking to draw traffic for our website.

SearchEnabler from the initial launch itself had included site speed loading time with comparative analysis as one important factor in SEO Site Analysis

Release of Page Speed Service

End of July, Google announced release of Page Speed Online API and started rolling out in limited numbers for trial usage. Our request to use page speed service was approved yesterday.

So what is this Page Speed Service?

It is an online service by Google that automatically speeds up loading time of your web pages by optimizing them. What it actually does is, when you opt for this service by signing up and pointing your site’s DNS entry to Google, it fetches content from your servers, rewrites all you web resources by applying best practices of web performance and then serves these optimized pages to end users across the globe through Google’s own servers. End users will see no difference in accessing those web pages except improved load times.

What’s in it for you site owners?

Now you don’t have to worry about various optimizing techniques for your web pages such as compressing images, caching, zipping, concatenating CSS or any other best known practices, Google’s Page Speed Service will do it for you and that’s what you will be asked to pay for.

Setting Up Page Speed Service

It took around 30 mins to setup Page Speed Service for SearchEnabler website. Configuration is through guided 4 step wizard in Page Speed Console. You need to provide serving domain URL, reference domain URL, perform ownership verification and update DNS settings to route your domain request through page speed service.
To check DNS propogation try out whatsmydns

After configuration, Google will fetch content from reference domain, rewrite to improve performance and start serving request for your serving domain. On performing test for serving domain at WebPageTest.org, we found Page Load Time improved by 70% and Repeat View Page Load Time by 60%.
Page Speed Console provides dashboard to monitor HTML request, Average HTML Page Load Time and Errors across time line.

We need to further observe, how site speed is reported in Google Webmaster, impact if any on search ranking’s and bounce rate.
Google is currently offering Page Speed Service free of charge and may start charging on completion of trial.
If you would like to try out, apply for access