Google is offering to speed up your website, eventually for a price. Image: Flickr / sonyanews / CC-BY

Page load times and speed have long been an obsession of Google’s. The better your page load time, the more likely you are to have a good ranking on Google search results. In order to help speed up the web, Google is now offering a service that promises to speed up page load times.

Google’s speed-load service

The Google Page Speed Service is relatively simple. You, as a webmaster, point your DNS registration to Google’s servers. When someone loads your website, Google rewrites your page code on the fly, and claims a 25 percent to 60 percent increase in speed for pages that it rewrites. Right now, the service is being offered for free, though the frequently asked questions state:

At this time, the service is being offered to a limited set of webmasters free of charge. Pricing will be competitive and details will be made available later. You will then have at least 30 days to decide if you want to continue using the service.

Concerns about Google pay-to-play

The Google Page Speed Service is not the first time Google has planned on charging for a service. However, many webmasters are expressing concern that Google’s Page Speed Service is the first step toward pay-for-play on Google search results. The reality is, to a certain extent all Google results are pay-for-play. It takes time and money to buy space on or set up servers, build links, create content and generally optimize your website to show up in the top portions of Google’s search results.

How to increase your page load time

If you are concerned about your page load time, there are steps you can take to decrease your load time.

• Optimize your images and content. Any content on a webpage other than text takes longer to load. Make sure that your images, videos and other non-text content has been optimized for the web.
• Make sure your stylesheets are at the top. Most browsers read progressively, from top to bottom. By putting stylesheets at the bottom, you are asking the browser to re-read the entire webpage after it has already been done once. Ideally, your CSS stylesheets should be stored in an outside document and called once on each page.
• Store things locally. The more URLs linked on a page, the more requests the computer has to send to servers and the longer it will take to load.
• Use redirects only when necessary. A redirect asks a web server to load a page twice, which can take twice as long or more.