Businesses who run web sites can experience slow load times, even on fast broadband connections. Today Google announced that it is offering a new feature -- the "Page Speed Service" -- that it claims will improve web site loading speeds. The announcement was made on Google"s official blog site by company team member Ram Ramani.
The new service does have a couple of catches. One of them is that your web site will be sped up in part by Google"s own servers. As Ramani describes it, "... 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." Google claims that it has testing web pages that have used the Page Speed Service and have seen the load times for those sites decrease by between 25 percent to 60 percent.
Another catch for the new service is that Google will charge a fee for web site operators to use its Page Speed Service. Google won"t comment on pricing, saying only that it will be "competitive". However, at the moment the company is still testing the service and it"s letting some web site operators try out the new feature for free. Webmasters who are interested in testing the feature can sign up at Google"s web site.