Accelerate your website with PageSpeed service

Google has made it its goal to make the Internet faster - in other words, to improve the surfing experience for users. There are various approaches to achieve this, one of the most important of which is PageSpeed Insights, which can be used to detect brakes in the delivery of web pages. In addition to individual aids, an overall score is also given to show how well the respective page is optimized.

Google PageSpeed Service

In addition to modules for web servers (Apache and nginx), Google also offers a PageSpeed service, where the pages are delivered directly by Google. Google directly optimizes the pages (sets the cache times, compresses images, removes HTML comments), so that pages can be loaded faster. In order to use this service - which is currently still in the beta stage and therefore free of charge - you have to change the DNS entries of your domain.

I tried this once for kadder.de (the page is currently delivered via the PageSpeed service), for this it was necessary to replace the original DNS A record for www.tech-blogger.net with a CNAME record on the Google server. The actual IP address is now only referenced by a sub-domain www1, which is indicated as source by Google. Using the Google API console you can configure which adjustments Google is allowed to make on delivery (e.g. whether Javascript is minified or how the images are compressed). If there are problems with scripts, you can also disable everything completely here without having to change the DNS configuration again.

Better PageSpeed Score

The use of the PageSpeed service had a direct effect on the page speed score. It was previously (with manual optimization, Nginx and W3TC plugin) at around 86, up to 97 are possible with the PageSpeedService. How this affects (for example the visibility on Google) I will observe in the next time and update this post then. If you want to try out the PageSpeedService for your own website, you can register on the Inform Google developer website.