Google Launches Trial of Page Speed Service

[engine]

Google Launches Trial of Page Speed Service [googlecode.blogspot.com]

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. 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. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed Service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later.

[londrum]

they should be more or less the same though. most of my visitors are from the UK (above 80%), so there's only one option for the test centre -- London.

i dont think a visitor from Liverpool (for example) is going to see a drop-off of 1 and a half seconds when the page is only coming from London. But that is the difference between WMT and their new page speed test.

if that is true, than you'd have to add on 3 seconds every time the user moved 300 miles further away

another thing i dont get is this: presumably google are measuring the difference between the time it takes for your own server to send it out and the time that google can do it in. but surely google will have to collect the page from your server first? otherwise how would it stay up to date? they must have to do it on the fly, or there's no point.

maybe if your page can be cached then you'll see some benefit, but otherwise all you'll get is the savings from crunched up images and minified and gzipped CSS/javascript. those are the kind of things that you can do yourself. why pay a load of money a month for something that you can fix in a few days?

if they were actually offering hosting services, then okay. but you will still be stuck with all your existing hosting problems. why pay your existing hosting bills and this on top. you may as well just combine the money and pay for a better host.

[MarvinH]

i don't think a visitor from Liverpool (for example) is going to see a drop-off of 1 and a half seconds when the page is only coming from London.

No need to do Liverpool / London comparison, since even your next door neighbor may experience the whole web 10 times slower than you, if you have much faster Internet connection than he does.

why pay a load of money a month for something that you can fix in a few days?

I agree. If you can compress your own text and images yourself, minify your css/js, cache your static content, enable Keep-Alive, etc, then your site may not benefit by a 3rd-party solution like this new Google service.

My site would also not benefit from the above, but I did numerous tests nevertheless. I tested, using various geographically-different test centers, just to see how this Google's service compares to my current CDN.

[jmccormac]

So Google hires the brightest? Wonder what bozos came up with this idea? Database backed websites are always going to be limited by the speed at which the content is served from the database. Now a little company by the name of Amazon has a solution for that. And even if you don't need Amazon's cloud, hosting your servers in your target market might be a lot better than depending on Google's sort of CDN.

Regards...jmcc

[Shatner]

Has anyone tried Cloudflare? How well does that actually work?

[n00b1]

I have and it just slowed things down for me for visitors close to my server. Perhaps visitors on the other side of the Atlantic had a better experience but my Analytics stats didn't reflect this.

[tangor]

but my Analytics stats didn't reflect this

Well known axiom in science is that any observer (method) affects the observation...

Try it without Analytics and see what happens.

[sailorjwd]

I'm signing up as soon as my site and butt recover from panda.

[n00b1]

Try it without analytics and see what happens.

I do intend to try it again at some point, but the point was that the time on site and bounce rate showed no noticeable improvement for the month I was using CloudFlare and sales were unaffected. Obviously this is a far too limited test sample to draw any solid conclusions from and I can see that, at the moment, user engagement with the website is significantly higher in the UK. I can only assume this is due to the website speed as the keywords it ranks for in both the US and UK are very similar.

[g1smd]

With Google serving your pages, they get to choose which accesses are allowed and which are blocked - and I'll bet the list is nothing like that in your robots.txt and .htaccess files.

I wonder how many bots they block? Especially blocking legitimate accesses from rival search engines, or letting in malicious stuff that you actually want to block.

Suddenly all of this is out of the site owners control.

I don't think anyone with a grain of sense is going to let Google sit right between their site and their customers. As well as altering code, they can alter your content in any way that they like, inserting or deleting things on the fly.

Skeeery stuff.

[MarvinH]

g1smd, I'm not exactly sure how the new service is set up, but if it is done the same way like a CDN, then I don't think Google would be able to have control over your site to such extent. For example, my CDN serves just my static content (images, js, css), it doesn't do anything with my base html file. The base html files are served straight from my server.

But again, I have no idea if the new G service works the same way. It kind of makes me want to sign up just to find out. :-)

[freejung]

if it is done the same way like a CDN

My understanding is that it is not. I don't think a CDN normally requires you to point your domain at their servers - they just host your images and stuff. From the article;

To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google.

That's the problem, and the reason why they would then have total control over everything about your site, including which user agents are allowed to access it.

[n00b1]

@freejung

Cloudflare, for example, requires you to point your nameservers to them.

[freejung]

Hmm, I didn't know that. Well, in that case I wouldn't use them either!

[johnmoose]

I am using them (cloudflare) and the advantages outweigh the disadvantages by far.

[jmccormac]

Would any webmaster take these people seriously after what they did with the Panda update/fiasco?

Regards...jmcc

[johnmoose]

@jmcc: yep.

[chrisv1963]

Would any webmaster take these people seriously after what they did with the Panda update/fiasco?

No, I'm afraid I will never trust a Google product again.

[leadegroot]

I tried (what is supposedly) the trial at webpagetest.org - and it was 3 times the load time of my own host. Oh, I laughed and laughed ;)

[MarvinH]

Leadegroot, what you tried was not a "trial", it was a "comparison test", which may or may not be accurate.

[damonCF]

I actually work for CloudFlare & thought I would clarify this statement:

cloudflare, for example, requires you to point your nameservers to them.

Going direct with CloudFlare does require switching DNS right now. The exception is if you activate through a hosting provider, which doesn't require switching NS at all. We'll also have CNAME pointing available very soon.