Google prepares service for speeding up webpages

Google has announced a new paid service for webmasters that will automatically speed up the loading of their webpages.

Page Speed Service, revealed on Thursday, joins other members of the Page Speed family including a browser extension for testing page performance and an online API to help developers figure out what they can do to speed up their pages.

According to Google engineering manager Ram Ramani, Page Speed Service will "simplify the life of webmasters" by letting them avoid having to install these various components, which also include an Apache module for automatically rewriting pages.

"To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site's DNS entry to Google," Ramani said. "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."

Ramani said testing of the new service had shown speed improvements of 25-60 percent on "several sites", but webmasters can see how much of an improvement they can expect to see by testing it themselves on their own pages.

"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," Ramani added.

The price for this service will be revealed at some later date, Ramani said, although developers can pre-register their interest.