Google Release New Page Speed Service – Our Review

Google announced their new Page Speed Service today, I won’t deny it, I was quite excited (sad I know). So I rushed over and started reading about it, they linked to a comparison test, awesome, as you can imagine nearly everyone in the room decided to run the comparison of how much they could speed up their website.

Unfortunately it seemed every single SEO in the World must have had the same idea, the site was showing a 23 minute wait!!! (In fact, later on they added a message to apologise for the long waits because of the Page Speed Service launch)

Anyways, 20 or so minutes later, here are our results:

Dave Naylor (www.davidnaylor.co.uk)

Dave’s site is hosted in England, the speed test server was hosted in Ireland.
First view
Original: 2.901s
Google’s Service: 2.539s (12.5% improvement)

Repeat view
Original: 1.646s
Google’s Service: 1.441s (12.5% improvement again)

That’s not a bad result considering, the test was run from Ireland aswell and Dave’s site is hosted in England. If you click on the image above it takes you to the test page where you can watch the load time videos, which are pretty cool.

Jordan (tested from Ireland)

Jordan’s website is hosted somewhere in the US (big place I know), but the speed test server was in Ireland.
First View
Original: 15.514s
Optimized: 9.745s (37.2% improvement)

Repeat View
Original: 4.709s
Optimized: 3.601s (23.5% improvement)

As you can see, Jordan’s free games site, which is hosted in the US, did see a massive improvement, definitely worth him giving it a try (excuse the shameless link, Jordan needs the link love).

Jordan (tested from Virgina, US)

First View
Original: 15.104s
Optimized: 6.596s (56.3% improvement)

Repeat View
Original: 4.390s
Optimized: 3.485s (20.6% improvement)

Judging from this, the fact that Google can load your content from their local server makes it a hell of a lot better than hosting your website in one place.

Alex

Alex’s football news site is hosted in the US, and the test was done from California.

First Page View
Original: 12.151s
Optimized: 9.069s (25.4% improvement)

Repeat Page View
Original: 7.480s
Optimized: 8.897s (18.9% worse)

My site (www.david-whitehouse.org)

My site is hosted in England, the speed test server was in Ireland.
First View
Original: 3.902s
Google’s Service: 4.612s (18.2% worse)!!

Repeat View
Original: 1.867s
Google’s Service: 1.983s (6.2% worse)!

So, not overly impressed with my results, quite proud that it beat Google’s service though. Since Google couldn’t improve the speed, mind you, if I tested it from other countries I’m sure Google would beat it, so I think I’ll be setting this up tonight. I’m guessing the reason it is slower than Dave’s is my web host isn’t as fast – perhaps I should switch…

Overall though, I think its a pretty good service, no doubt it would improve speed for sites when the host is far away, instead you can simply have Google supply a lot of the content directly from their server – kind of like a free Content Delivery Network I guess, CDN services won’t be pleased about todays news, but its good news for anyone who wants to improve their site speed.

If you want to compare your own website, you can do so here, don’t forget to watch the video, it really does highlight what a difference it makes.