Google Soups Up Page Speeds For Web Developers

According to Google, the Page Speed Service rewrites Web pages for faster loading times.

"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," wrote Google engineering manager Ram Ramani in a blog post announcing Google Page Speed Service. "Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times."

Page Speed Service works behind the scenes to boost Web speeds and page performance. According to Ramani, Google's tests of Page Speed Service resulted in speed improvements of 25 percent to 60 percent on several Web sites.

Google is offering Page Speed Service to a select number of Web developers for free. Later this year, Google will officially launch the product. Google said "pricing will be competitive."

Page Speed Service comes roughly two years after Google released the Page Speed browser extension, which Web developers can use to evaluate the performance of their Web pages and receive suggestions on how to improve them; and several months after the launch of the Page Speed Online API, which also providers Web developers with specific suggestions to make their Web pages faster.

Page Speed Service, a cloud-based service, requires users sign up and point their site's DNS entry to Google. Ramani wrote that the goal is to take the onus of better performance off of the webmaster or Web developer and put it in Google's hands.

"Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices," Ramani said.