Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: performance

Optimizing for Bandwidth on Apache and Nginx

Thursday, September 04, 2014

Webmaster level: advancedEveryone wants to use less bandwidth: hosts want lower bills, mobile users want to stay under their limits, and no one wants to wait for unnecessary bytes. The web is full of opportunities to save bandwidth: pages served without gzip, stylesheets and JavaScript served unminified, and unoptimized images, just to name a few.So why isn't the web already optimized for bandwidth? If these savings are good for everyone then why haven't they been fixed yet? Mostly it's just been too much hassle. Web designers are encouraged to "save for web" when exporting their artwork, but they don't always remember. JavaScript programmers don't like working with minified code because it makes debugging harder. You can set up a custom pipeline that makes sure each of these optimizations is applied to your site every time as part of your development or deployment process, but that's a lot of work.An easy solution for web users is to use an optimizing proxy, like Chrome's. When users opt into this service their HTTP traffic goes via Google's proxy, which optimizes their page loads and cuts bandwidth usage by 50%. While this is great for these users, it's limited to people using Chrome who turn the feature on and it can't optimize HTTPS traffic.With Optimize for Bandwidth, the PageSpeed team is bringing this same technology to webmasters so that everyone can benefit: users of other browsers, secure sites, desktop users, and site owners who want to bring down their outbound traffic bills. Just install the PageSpeed module on your Apache or Nginx server [1], turn on Optimize for Bandwidth in your configuration, and PageSpeed will do the rest.If you later decide you're interested in PageSpeed's more advanced optimizations, from cache extension and inlining to the more aggressive image lazyloading and defer JavaScript, it's just a matter of enabling them in your PageSpeed configuration.Learn more about installing PageSpeed or enabling Optimize for Bandwidth.Posted by Jeff Kaufman, Make the Web Fastopen sourceIISATS

Making your site more mobile-friendly with PageSpeed Insights

Monday, May 19, 2014

Webmaster level: all

To help developers and webmasters make their pages mobile-friendly, we recently updated PageSpeed Insights with additional recommendations on mobile usability.

Poor usability can diminish the benefits of a fast page load. We know the average mobile page takes more than 7 seconds to load, and by using the PageSpeed Insights tool and following its speed recommendations, you can make your page load much faster. But suppose your fast mobile site loads in just 2 seconds instead of 7 seconds. If mobile users still have to spend another 5 seconds once the page loads to pinch-zoom and scroll the screen before they can start reading the text and interacting with the page, then that site isn’t really fast to use after all. PageSpeed Insights’ new User Experience rules can help you find and fix these usability issues.

These new recommendations currently cover the following areas:

Configure the viewport: Without a meta-viewport tag, modern mobile browsers will assume your page is not mobile-friendly, and will fall back to a desktop viewport and possibly apply font-boosting, interfering with your intended page layout. Configuring the viewport to width=device-width should be your first step in mobilizing your site.
Size content to the viewport: Users expect mobile sites to scroll vertically, not horizontally. Once you’ve configured your viewport, make sure your page content fits the width of that viewport, keeping in mind that not all mobile devices are the same width.
Use legible font sizes: If users have to zoom in just to be able read your article text on their smartphone screen, then your site isn’t mobile-friendly. PageSpeed Insights checks that your site’s text is large enough for most users to read comfortably.
Size tap targets appropriately: Nothing’s more frustrating than trying to tap a button or link on a phone or tablet touchscreen, and accidentally hitting the wrong one because your finger pad is much bigger than a desktop mouse cursor. Make sure that your mobile site’s touchscreen tap targets are large enough to press easily.
Avoid plugins: Most smartphones don’t support Flash or other browser plugins, so make sure your mobile site doesn't rely on plugins.

These rules are described in more detail in our help pages. When you’re ready, you can test your pages and the improvements you make using the PageSpeed Insights tool. We’ve also updated PageSpeed Insights to use a mobile friendly design, and we’ve translated our documents into additional languages.

As always, if you have any questions or feedback, please post in our discussion group.

Posted by Matthew Steele and Doantam Phan, PageSpeed Insights team

Making smartphone sites load fast

Thursday, August 08, 2013

tell ustakes more than 7 seconds to loadguidelinesPageSpeed Insights toolPrioritizing above-the-fold contentshowscritical rendering path

Server must render the response (< 200 ms)

Number of redirects should be minimized

Number of roundtrips to first render should be minimized

Avoid external blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content

Reserve time for browser layout and rendering (200 ms)

Optimize JavaScript execution and rendering time

mobile-specific help pagesPageSpeed Insightsdiscussion groupPosted by Bryan McQuade, Software Engineer, and Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Make the web faster with mod_pagespeed, now out of Beta

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

If your page is on the web, speed matters. For developers and webmasters, making your page faster shouldn’t be a hassle, which is why we introduced mod_pagespeed in 2010. Since then the development team has been working to improve the functionality, quality and performance of this open-source Apache module that automatically optimizes web pages and their resources. Now, after almost two years and eighteen releases, we are announcing that we are taking off the Beta label.

We’re committed to working with the open-source community to continue evolving mod_pagespeed, including more, better and smarter optimizations and support for other web servers. Over 120,000 sites are already using mod_pagespeed to improve the performance of their web pages using the latest techniques and trends in optimization. The product is used worldwide by individual sites, and is also offered by hosting providers, such as DreamHost, Go Daddy and content delivery networks like EdgeCast. With the move out of beta we hope that even more sites will soon benefit from the web performance improvements offered through mod_pagespeed.

mod_pagespeed is a key part of our goal to help make the web faster for everyone. Users prefer faster sites and we have seen that faster pages lead to higher user engagement, conversions, and retention. In fact, page speed is one of the signals in search ranking and ad quality scores. Besides evangelizing for speed, we offer tools and technologies to help measure, quantify, and improve performance, such as Site Speed Reports in Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights, and PageSpeed Optimization products. In fact, both mod_pagespeed and PageSpeed Service are based on our open-source PageSpeed Optimization Libraries project, and are important ways in which we help websites take advantage of the latest performance best practices.

To learn more about mod_pagespeed and how to incorporate it in your site, watch our recent Google Developers Live session or visit the mod_pagespeed product page.

Posted by Joshua Marantz and Ilya Grigorik, Google PageSpeed Team

Making more pages load instantly

Thursday, May 17, 2012

Webmaster level: All

At Google we're obsessed with speed. We've long known that even seemingly minor speed increases can have surprisingly large impacts on user engagement and happiness. About a year ago we rolled out Instant Pages in pursuit of that goal. Instant Pages makes use of prerendering technology in Chrome to make your site appear to load instantly in some cases, with no need for any extra work on your part. Here's a video of it in action:

We've been closely watching performance and listening to webmaster feedback. Since Instant Pages rolled out we've saved more than a thousand years of ours users' time. We're very happy with the results so far, and we'll be gradually increasing how often we trigger the feature.

In the vast majority of cases, webmasters don't have to do anything for their sites to work correctly with prerendering. As we mentioned in our initial announcement of Instant Pages, search traffic will be measured in Webmaster Tools just like before this feature: only results the user visits will be counted. If your site keeps track of pageviews on its own, you might be interested in the Page Visibility API, which allows you to detect when prerendering is occurring and factor those out of your statistics. If you use an ads or analytics package, check with them to see if their solution is already prerender-aware; if it is, in many cases you won't need to make any changes at all. If you're interested in triggering Chrome's prerendering within your own site, see the Prerendering in Chrome article.

Instant Pages means that users arrive at your site happier and more engaged, which is great for everyone.

Posted by Ziga Mahkovec - Software Engineer, Instant Pages

Preparing your site for a traffic spike

Thursday, February 09, 2012

Webmaster level: Intermediate

It’s a moment any site owner both looks forward to, and dreads: a huge surge in traffic to your site (yay!) can often cause your site to crash (boo!). Maybe you’ll create a piece of viral content, or get Slashdotted, or maybe Larry Page will get a tattoo and your site on tech tattoos will be suddenly in vogue.

Many people go online immediately after a noteworthy event—a political debate, the death of a celebrity, or a natural disaster—to get news and information about that event. This can cause a rapid increase in traffic to websites that provide relevant information, and may even cause sites to crash at the moment they’re becoming most popular. While it’s not always possible to anticipate such events, you can prepare your site in a variety of ways so that you’ll be ready to handle a sudden surge in traffic if one should occur:

Prepare a lightweight version of your site.
Consider maintaining a lightweight version of your website; you can then switch all of your traffic over to this lightweight version if you start to experience a spike in traffic. One good way to do this is to have a mobile version of your site, and to make the mobile site available to desktop/PC users during periods of high traffic. Another low-effort option is to just maintain a lightweight version of your homepage, since the homepage is often the most-requested page of a site as visitors start there and then navigate out to the specific area of the site that they’re interested in. If a particular article or picture on your site has gone viral, you could similarly create a lightweight version of just that page.
A couple tips for creating lightweight pages:

Exclude decorative elements like images or Flash wherever possible; use text instead of images in the site navigation and chrome, and put most of the content in HTML.
Use static HTML pages rather than dynamic ones; the latter place more load on your servers. You can also cache the static output of dynamic pages to reduce server load.

Take advantage of stable third-party services.
Another alternative is to host a copy of your site on a third-party service that you know will be able to withstand a heavy stream of traffic. For example, you could create a copy of your site—or a pared-down version with a focus on information relevant to the spike—on a platform like Google Sites or Blogger; use services like Google Docs to host documents or forms; or use a content delivery network (CDN).
Use lightweight file formats.
If you offer downloadable information, try to make the downloaded files as small as possible by using lightweight file formats. For example, offering the same data as a plain text file rather than a PDF can allow users to download the exact same content at a fraction of the filesize (thereby lightening the load on your servers). Also keep in mind that, if it’s not possible to use plain text files, PDFs generated from textual content are more lightweight than PDFs with images in them. Text-based PDFs are also easier for Google to understand and index fully.
Make tabular data available in CSV and XML formats.
If you offer numerical or tabular data (data displayed in tables), we recommend also providing it in CSV and/or XML format. These filetypes are relatively lightweight and make it easy for external developers to use your data in external applications or services in cases where you want the data to reach as many people as possible, such as in the wake of a natural disaster.

We’d love to hear your tips and tricks for weathering traffic spikes—come join us in our Webmaster Help Forum.

Posted by Susan Moskwa, Webmaster Trends Analyst

Page Speed Service - Web Performance, Delivered.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Webmaster level: Advanced

Two years ago we released the Page Speed browser extension and earlier this year the Page Speed Online API to provide developers with specific suggestions to make their web pages faster. Last year we released mod_pagespeed, an Apache module, to automatically rewrite web pages. To further simplify the life of webmasters and to avoid the hassles of installation, today we are releasing the latest addition to the Page Speed family: Page Speed Service.

Page Speed Service is an online service that automatically speeds up loading of your web pages. To use the service, you need to sign up and point your site’s DNS entry to Google. Page Speed Service fetches content from your servers, rewrites your pages by applying web performance best practices, and serves them to end users via Google's servers across the globe. Your users will continue to access your site just as they did before, only with faster load times. Now you don’t have to worry about concatenating CSS, compressing images, caching, gzipping resources or other web performance best practices.

In our testing we have seen speed improvements of 25% to 60% on several sites. But we know you care most about the numbers for your site, so check out how much Page Speed Service can speed up your site. If you’re encouraged by the results, please sign up. If not, be sure to check back later. We are diligently working on adding more improvements to the service.

At this time, Page Speed 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 can request access to the service by filling out this web form.

Posted by Ram Ramani, Engineering Manager

Page Speed Online has a shiny new API

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Andrew

Richard

Webmaster level: intermediate

A few weeks ago, we introduced Page Speed Online, a web-based performance analysis tool that gives developers optimization suggestions. Almost immediately, developers asked us to make an API available to integrate into other tools and their regression testing suites. We were happy to oblige.

Today, as part of Google I/O, we are excited to introduce the Page Speed Online API as part of the Google APIs. With this API, developers now have the ability to integrate performance analysis very simply in their command-line tools and web performance dashboards.

We have provided a getting started guide that helps you to get up and running quickly, understand the API, and start monitoring the performance improvements that you make to your web pages. Not only that, in the request, you’ll be able to specify whether you’d like to see mobile or desktop analysis, and also get Page Speed suggestions in one of the 40 languages that we support, giving API access to the vast majority of developers in their native or preferred language.

We’re also pleased to share that the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache now uses the Page Speed Online API to provide Page Speed suggestions to WordPress users, right in the WordPress dashboard. “The Page Speed tool itself provides extremely pointed and valuable insight into performance pitfalls. Providing that tool via an API has allowed me to directly correlate that feedback with actionable solutions that W3 Total Cache provides.” said Frederick Townes, CTO Mashable and W3 Total Cache author.

Take the Page Speed Online API for a spin and send us feedback on our mailing list. We’d love to hear your experience integrating the new Page Speed Online API.

Andrew Oates is a Software Engineer on the Page Speed Team in Google's Cambridge, Massachusetts office. You can find him in the credits for the Pixar film Up.

Richard Rabbat is the Product Management Lead on the "Make the Web Faster" initiative. He has launched Page Speed, mod_pagespeed and WebP. At Google since 2006, Richard works with engineering teams across the world.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Andrew Oates and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed Team

Introducing Page Speed Online, with mobile support

Thursday, March 31, 2011

Webmaster level: intermediate

At Google, we’re striving to make the whole web fast. As part of that effort, we’re launching a new web-based tool in Google Labs, Page Speed Online, which analyzes the performance of web pages and gives specific suggestions for making them faster. Page Speed Online is available from any browser, at any time. This allows website owners to get immediate access to Page Speed performance suggestions so they can make their pages faster.

In addition, we’ve added a new feature: the ability to get Page Speed suggestions customized for the mobile version of a page, specifically smartphones. Due to the relatively limited CPU capabilities of mobile devices, the high round-trip times of mobile networks, and rapid growth of mobile usage, understanding and optimizing for mobile performance is even more critical than for the desktop, so Page Speed Online now allows you to easily analyze and optimize your site for mobile performance. The mobile recommendations are tuned for the unique characteristics of mobile devices, and contain several best practices that go beyond the recommendations for desktop browsers, in order to create a faster mobile experience. New mobile-targeted best practices include eliminating uncacheable landing page redirects and reducing the amount of JavaScript parsed during the page load, two common issues that slow down mobile pages today.

Page Speed Online is powered by the same Page Speed SDK that powers the Chrome and Firefox extensions and webpagetest.org.

Please give Page Speed Online a try. We’re eager to hear your feedback on our mailing list and how you’re using it to optimize your site.

Posted by Andrew Oates and Richard Rabbat, Page Speed team

You and site performance, sitting in a tree...

Sunday, May 02, 2010

speed is a signal in rankingsThe Need For Speed: Google Says It Mattersverify ownership of your websiteplugin

Is it possible to check my server response time from different areas around the world?Yes. WebPagetest.org can test performance from the United States (both East and West Coast—go West Coast! :), United Kingdom, China, and New Zealand.What's a good response time to aim for?First, if your competition is fast, they may provide a better user experience than your site for your same audience. In that case, you may want to make your site better, stronger, faster...

Otherwise, studies by Akamai claim 2 seconds as the threshold for ecommerce site "acceptability." Just as an FYI, at Google we aim for under a half-second.Does progressive rendering help users?Definitely! Progressive rendering is when a browser can display content as it’s available incrementally rather than waiting for all the content to display at once. This provides users faster visual feedback and helps them feel more in control. Bing experimented with progressive rendering by sending users their visual header (like the logo and searchbox) quickly, then the results/ads once they were available. Bing found a 0.7% increase in satisfaction with progressive rendering. They commented that this improvement compared with full feature rollout.

How can you implement progressive rendering techniques on your site? Put stylesheets at the top of the page. This allows a browser to start displaying content ASAP.code.google.com/speed/Written by Maile Ohye, Developer Programs Tech Lead

Using site speed in web search ranking

Friday, April 09, 2010

our productson the webinternal studiesreduces operating costs

Page Speed, an open source Firefox/Firebug add-on that evaluates the performance of web pages and gives suggestions for improvement.

YSlow, a free tool from Yahoo! that suggests ways to improve website speed.

WebPagetest shows a waterfall view of your pages' load performance plus an optimization checklist.

In Webmaster Tools, Labs > Site Performance shows the speed of your website as experienced by users around the world as in the chart below. We've also blogged about site performance.

Many other tools on code.google.com/speed.

relevance of a pagePosted by Amit Singhal, Google Fellow and Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer, Google Search Quality Team

Webmaster Central Blog

Optimizing for Bandwidth on Apache and Nginx

Making your site more mobile-friendly with PageSpeed Insights

Making smartphone sites load fast

Make the web faster with mod_pagespeed, now out of Beta

Making more pages load instantly

Preparing your site for a traffic spike

Page Speed Service - Web Performance, Delivered.

Page Speed Online has a shiny new API

Introducing Page Speed Online, with mobile support

You and site performance, sitting in a tree...

Using site speed in web search ranking

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