Google Launches Trial of Page Speed Service

I'm giving it a go now although it currently quotes me a waiting time of 58 minutes - I'm from the UK.

The site I'm testing has web pages that have really bad, spaghetti html in them, loads of pictures as well so it will be interesting to see what the result is.

Keep us updated on how you get on. It'll be interesting to see what kind of sites benefit from the service.

I'd read ALL the FAQs first before jumping into this.

What is the impact of using Page Speed Service on image search ranking? - As a result of using Page Speed Service, some images may change to a new location and may get recompressed. This means that search engines such as Google Image Search can take some time to find and update the index with the new image locations. During that time, your image search rankings can be affected by the move to different URLs.

^ That's just one of many gotchas.

Page Speed Service - Frequently Asked Questions
[code.google.com...]

Oh, get this...

Migrating from a bare domain - Bare domains are two level domains such as example.com. Note the missing www prefix. Such domains are not supported by Page Speed Service. The instructions below describe how you can safely migrate your site from a bare domain (say from example.com to www.example.com) so you can start using Page Speed Service.

CNAME Site Troubleshooting Tips
[code.google.com...]

Sorry Google, not interested. I just ran the test and you can only save me just under 1 second of load time, it just isn't worth me jumping through hoops of fire to set everything up. Also, something just doesn't feel right about letting a 3rd party rewrite my docs through a proxy before serving to visitors.

It quotes me 20% improvement for page load time and repeat page load improvement of 40%. Obviously a significant improvement but I can't find any details on how they make the improvements. Anyone any ideas how they do it? From the results it appears that they only test the home page but it's not clear about that.

The site is a basic html with five or six images per page. It uses no technology after 2003! And mostly way before that. It is FrontPage designed. No databases.

[edited by: nomis5 at 2:53 pm (utc) on Jul 28, 2011]

Anyone any ideas how they do it?

Through a series of Rewriters...

Rewriters
[code.google.com...]

[edited by: pageoneresults at 2:51 pm (utc) on Jul 28, 2011]

I ran the test and my original is faster than the optimized version.

... All your Content Are Belong to Us ...

Seems like too much control for a single company that decides who lives and dies on the internet of free information.

Just my opinion.

Edited to add:

Tested a fairly heavy 380k page, and using the test service, would gain .388 (7.9%) seconds.

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.

Not. Ever.

Since when did serving all your content through Google's control become an idea that's anything other than insanity? They change something in the future to screw you over, you need to unhook from them, well, what could possibly go wrong? {/rhetorical questions}

If you're concerned about page speed, there are far easier and better alternatives to this.

Tested a fairly heavy 380k page, and using the test service, would gain .388 (7.9%) seconds.

Removing white space, unnecessary tags, and shortening variable names could likely have a similiar effect.

Scary stuff... Trust Google even more? Ha! I'll just stick to my CDN service and tweaking files on my own. I learn more that way anyway...

Google made my site 5 percent slower by "optimizing" it.

Quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentis.

Erm... Yeah Google made me 356% slower. Cheers G.

I would retest as I'm sure something was up with that result but the second load was also slightly slower on the 'optimised' version.

is this an april fool's joke? Or is Skynet another half step closer?

So what do we all do when G announces next year that all sites using this "service" will get a ranking boost? Then we're really down the rabbit hole...

No improvement here either, 1.8% slower actually, and this is on a page that's fairly graphics rich and not very well optimized (no CDN, no CSS sprites, a few local scripts loading at the end of the 'head' section). The loading graphs showed more concurrency, but a longer "time to first byte" than on my own server. The Page Speed score actually dropped as well for the "optimized" version, but I think that was mainly due to the "Remove query strings from static resources" error (without these errors on all the static resources, the score would have been higher).

The original test was done a server geographically located near my own server, so I thought perhaps a farther away test might yield more improvement (or any improvement). Did a US east coast test (my server is on the west coast), and the "optimized" version was even worse.

If you want to use such a service, Cloudflare is my opinion much cooler.

Will you walk into my parlour ? said the spider..

TSTT. I'm looking forward to getting real results over time. As usual, it looks like Google is testing something on us and they haven't got the bugs out yet.

Right now, I would like to wish this upon my competitors.

After they have worked the bugs out and discovered the hidden gotchas, then maybe I'll start reviewing it in detail.

Just tested two pages, and GA shows 50(est.) visits from Ireland and another 30(est.) from US to test pages... looks like they made a great tool to fool GA stats :)

Wow, great, sure, I'd put my trust in a company that Pandalised a site to smithereens in their own results...freakin' awesome idea eh?

They lost me at bare domains. I drop www for a reason.

also, are we supposed to trust G - the very people who cause innumerable sites to hang due to waiting for adsense, plus one, google analytics, etc, etc, etc - these are the people we are supposed to trust to deliver our whole sites to people's monitors in a timely fashion?

I am still opting for "mistimed april fool's joke".

Google continues to target consumers and unsavvy webmasters, to the exclusion and in many cases to the detriment, of savvy webmasters.

Whether that's a smart move remains to be seen. There's lots of distrust and anger here, whether consumers care is another matter entirely. But for the regular business owner, they may direct their webmaster to do this because 'google says so, and it makes my site faster'.

Not unlike google analytics, where they destroyed most of an entire industry (analytics) and are gathering data without anyone caring - standard consumer only knows that it's free and doesn't look past the trojan horse aspect.

Will you walk into my parlour ? said the spider..

Yes said the dumb fly. I'd love too, what can possibly go wrong...

And the BIG BAD spider smiled....i love dumb flies. In fact, i strive on them.

Stupidity has no limits...

I did one brief comparison test of my home page. The "Google-optimized" version was considerably slower, but I somehow expected that could happen. In the past several months I've done a lot of work to speed my site. I have removed unnecessary features/code, combined .js and .css, put my site on a CDN, etc.

I suspect this new Google's service may negatively impact businesses that provide CDN and other services.

Wow, great, sure, I'd put my trust in a company that Pandalised a site to smithereens in their own results...freakin' awesome idea eh?

Exactly what I was thinking. Also, according to the test I ran this "speed service" would make my website slower. Again Google is making a fool of themselves. The second time already this year. The first time was with the "great" Panda update.

As someone else mentioned, CloudFlare is a much better option if you're going this route. They also have some added features Google doesn't have and have been doing this longer. And that part where you don't have to point your DNS to an advertising company and give them complete and total access to everyone and everything that goes on with your site.

What a shock that Google also happened to have a.....cloud service. I have DSL and don't care if the page loads at 2.8 or 3.1 seconds. Frankly the sites I visit the most load at 5-10+ seconds. To me this is scam to promote their services, like they they are doing for local, blogspot, G+, books, adwords, offers and everything else.

It's getting ridiculous, using their only milk cow hoping other, mediocre at best, services succeed.

I'd rather keep everything on my server, if it fails, everything fails. It makes no sense to have everything wait for ever because a javascript is lost in space and is waiting to load.

I also question their speed claims: I know it for a fact that Adwords and G+ slow down my page quite a bit. If they can't speed those, how can they speed my site?

From the sites I have tested, although the full load of the page was reported faster via Google proxy, the perceived speed (what the visitor sees above the fold as the page renders) was slower via Google proxy.