Google recently announced Page Speed Service, an online service that helps webmasters speed up the loading time of their web pages.
Currently, Google is offering this service to a limited amount of subscribers, free of charge. Eventually this will lead to a paid service. Google has not indicated the on-going going cost of Page Speed, but it promises to be “competitive”. My assumption is this will not be for small-business budgets, but we will see.
To request access to Page Speed Service, Google has provided this form: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/viewform?hl=en_US&formkey=dDdjcmNBZFZsX2c0SkJPQnR3aGdnd0E6MQ&ndplr=1
Google Page Speed Service
Page Speed Service will fetch the content, rewrite the code based to improve the speed, then serves them back out to the web for users to find.
“The extent of speed up Page Speed Service provides depends on a variety of factors such as content on your pages, browser, geographic location of access, bandwidth, etc. This page lists instructions to schedule tests from different locations around the world, on different browsers and on different networks, so you can measure the exact speed up for your site, and understand the results.” – http://code.google.com/speed/pss/docs/tryit.html
As a search engine marketer, I can’t help but wonder what affect this will have on search engine rankings. Google has made it clear that site speed affects rankings. So logically, it would make sense that Google would connect a financial incentive to that requirement, by encouraging webmaster to sign up for Page Speed Service.
If webmasters want to run a test on how adjustments can improve their site, try http://www.webpagetest.org/compare.
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August 1st, 2011 at 8:15 pm
While in some ways it’s a bitter pill for webmasters like me, nonetheless I think this is a brilliant set of moves on Google’s part. It’s bitter because it can be so very hard to speed up a site. In particular, it’s often things beyond your control. For example, for several years I kept telling anyone who would listen how poor a particular host was, but only got support to do something about it relatively recently — after Google made it clear speed was going to matter in rankings. And now we’re on a screamer of a new server. Thanks to Google.
August 16th, 2011 at 9:46 am
Since page load speed is a ranking factor this is obviously a useful tool. Since it’s provided by Google, you have to wonder if this will have a big impact on the ranking of the site in Google.
August 25th, 2011 at 11:58 am
Page speed service is one of the best tools introduced by Google. I guess it’s totally advantageous for every webmasters who could save a lot of time in loading sites. Apart from saving time, I am excited to look on some extra work with fast loaded pages. No matter my bandwidth speed fails as page speed service would balance and load the site fast. Thanks to Google for giving an excellent speedy service to all its users.