It’s not a joke. Google just launched their new Page Speed Service and according to their tests the average performance improvement is between 25% and 60%!

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How It Works

But how does it work?  Well, according to the Google Code blog, you just sign up and point your website’s DNS to Google.  The Page Speed Service will then fetch your website content, rewrite your webpages and then serve them from Google’s servers all across the globe.  Google Engineering Manager, Ram Ramani, says when you’re using the Page Speed Service “you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.”

Try It Out

Don’t believe it?  Click here to try it yourself on your own site or any other site on the web and read here to understand the results.

Why I’m Stoked

If I’m understanding this service correctly this could be absolutely HUGE for webmasters, especially those using WordPress, Joomla, and other content management systems. Why? Because most content management systems are terrible at optimization! Sure, many of them work great out-of-the-box. But as soon you install a few plugins or load the wrong theme your page loading times increase dramatically. This is not the fault of the CMS developers; it’s just how any plugin system is designed to work. The plugins remain separate from each other and therefore each CSS and JS file remains separate as well. This is great for the person who maintains the website but it’s absolutely the wrong way to send content to your users.

Based on what I’m reading Google wants to help webmasters do all of the following with little to no effort from the webmaster:

• Concatenate CSS and JavaScript
• Compress images
• Cache content
• Gzip resources
• Use a content delivery network (CDNs can increase performance and delivery of your content to users across the globe by caching it at servers local to each user)

How To Get In

This is a brilliant move by Google, though I will say the results aren’t entirely perfect for every site as you can see below.

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For now the service is only being offered to a limited number of users (you can try to sign up here), but it’s expected to open up to more users in the future. According to the blog post this service will NOT be free forever, but will instead be offered at a competitive price which has not yet been announced.

I’m definitely intrigued to say the least. I think this will take the blog world by storm.