At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our
websites load and display faster improves the user's experience and helps them become more
productive. Today, we want to share with the web community some of the best practices we've
used and developed over the years, by open-sourcing Page
Speed.
Page Speed is a tool we've been using internally to
improve the performance of our web pages -- it's a Firefox Add-on integrated with Firebug. When you run
Page Speed, you get immediate suggestions on how you can change your web pages to improve
their speed. For example, Page Speed automatically optimizes images for you, giving you a
compressed image that you can use immediately on your web site. It also identifies issues such
as JavaScript and CSS loaded by your page that wasn't actually used to display the page, which
can help reduce time your users spend waiting for the page to download and display.
Page Speed's suggestions are based on a set of commonly accepted
best practices that we and other websites
implement. To help you understand the suggestions and rules, we have created detailed
documentation to describe the rationale behind
each of the rules. We look forward to your feedback on the Webmaster Help Forum.
We hope you give Page Speed a
try.
By
Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade, Page Speed Team
