Google has launched a new service designed to improve website loading times by up to 60%.

Page Speed Service is the latest addition to Google’s product portfolio. It is aimed at webmasters hoping to improve their page loading times.

The service works by fetching websites through Google’s service. It then automatically rewrites them using web performance best practice before running them back through Google’s servers to the end user.

The result is a massive reduction in page loading times – something that can make the difference between people staying on your page or leaving because it is taking too long to load.

Google says that it improved website loading speeds by 25 to 60% during its testing phase. It also offers an online test facility to give people an idea of the rate of improvement that they can expect should they use the service.

Experts say that the service is basically a web hosting facility that can work as an effective backup to your own web hosting provision.

The service is running for free for a limited period of time only. Webmasters interested in the service need to sign up as soon as possible in order to benefit from the cost-free phase.

Google has not revealed its cost plans yet, but has stated that the service will be “competitive”.

With time being one of the business world’s most precious commodities, it is important that websites load quickly and completely – or you risk losing the prospective customer. As search engines like Google continue to develop their ranking algorithms, evidence is emerging that loading time is now included in their scoring systems. Consequently, how fast your site loads will have an impact on your site’s position in the search results.

The easiest and quickest way to reduce your loading time is to limit the number of web elements on each page. Elements include items such as scripts, images and any Flash components. Each element requires an http marker within the page’s code, creating http requests to the server for each component. The more elements you have, the more requests and the slower the page will load.

Ask yourself – for every piece of your webpage – what value does it add to my site, to my SEO and to my customers? If the answer is low or none, then cut it.

This doesn’t mean images should be avoided completely, but if they are essential, make sure they are optimised. Images should not be written into your code as they stand, but should be saved as suitable for web, with a screen-only resolution of 72 dpi and in GIF or PNG format. It also makes sense to resize the images so they reflect the size on screen.

For more information and advice on how to optimise your website design for the search engines, and ensure it loads in the shortest possible time, contact NSDesign for a free no-obligation consultation.