Google is rolling out its new Page Speed Service, a way for webmasters to make their sites faster.
The product, which rewrites pages so they're optimized for performance, is currently being given to a limited number of site owners free of charge. When Page Speed Service launches publicly, it will be competitively priced, according to Google. However, details about pricing aren't currently available.
"Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices," Google engineering manager Ram Ramani writes on the company blog. "Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times."
A gallery of examples shows pages loading from 27% to 62% faster. If you're curious as to how Page Speed would enhance your own site's performance, you can test what the tweaks would do for any URL. We ran the afore-linked test on VentureBeat.com and found that Page Speed would improve our own homepage load time by 57.4%.
The entire concept of speed and a faster Internet is something of an obsession with Google. It's got Google Fiber, an ambitious demo of a 1-gigabit-per-second fiber network for residential web users. It's also working on Go, a programming language that's all about being faster than anything else available to developers. Last year, we heard that Google was even using site speed as a factor in page ranking.
And all that's just on the back end. For consumers, Google has been showing off new search features such as Suggest, Instant and real-time search.
Also, just last month, the company demonstrated Instant Pages, which uses web rendering to load webpages from search results three to five times faster.
Interested parties can sign up for Page Speed free and early access via Google's web form. It is unknown how many webmasters will be asked to participate in the trial or what criteria Google is using for participant selection.