Google is now offering its Page Speed service, which just released a Chrome extension last week, as a browser-agnostic Web service called Page Speed Online. Just enter a URL and get the results. It also has a new feature offering suggestions for mobile optimization.
According to the Page Speed FAQ, “Page Speed Online provides the same analysis as the Page Speed browser extensions for Chrome and Firefox, without needing to install a browser extension.” Google suggests the browser extensions for testing pages not available to the public Internet, such as corporate intranets and sites under development. However, I receive slightly different results when running tests using the browswer extension instead of the Web-only service.
On the up side, the company seems to have also sped the service up both for the Web service and the browser extensions.
As Louis Gray reminds us, Matt Cutts, the head of Google’s webspam team, wrote last year that faster loading will rank higher in search results. So using tools to speed up your site’s performance is of growing importance.
The Chrome extension can be found here and the Firefox extension here. Google also offers an Apache module called mode_pagespeed for implementing its suggestions.
Yahoo offers a competing service is called YSlow.
