Google shutting down PageSpeed Service

[Harry P]

Just read this news and I've visited Google PageSpeed and seen the announcement

PageSpeed Service has been deprecated and will be turned down on 3rd August.

what do you think about this?

Which tools will you use for an alternative?

 

[ridgley]

Ya, I read an article about the closing of google page speed. Well according to them, they want to focus on other. Only them know the real reason. There is cloudflare and webpage test as alternative.

 

[elcidofaguy]

There are quite a few tools which can help measure website performance from ping plotter (desktop freeware) or just search online for "website performance tools" e.g. tools.pingdom.com, webpagetest.org, gtmetrix.com etc. The important thing with testing is to examine how your website performs in different locations e.g. US, Canada, Europe etc.

To be blunt I'm not too bothered about Google getting rid of this tool.. For the most part I have noted that the recommended changes can be difficult to implement, especially when using CMS's such as Wordpress.

For me I keep it simple. My focus is on:

1) Good performing reliable host.
2) Ensure images are scaled accordingly.
3) Minimize the number of plugins. If you can avoid using a plugin in favour of using alternative approach then go for that e.g. embed script/code to header/footer, use htaccess etc where possible.

At the end of the day if my website loads within a couple of seconds then I'm okay about it... Most users would be okay with that too... and hence I personally do not bother to spend time/efforts on improving on that when we are talking about Milli-seconds etc.. It seems to me that Google's page speed tool seems to always spell out doom regardless, even when you are happy with the current performance.. Perhaps that's part of the reason they are getting rid of it lol...

Overall I would say keep it simple... Test your website at different geo locations and ensure the main areas are optimized for performance e.g. images, plugin/scripts, web hosting etc...

 

[RDO Servers]

Google Pagespeed is a good tool, but there are lots of other great page speed tools out there. I use Pingdom most often.

Keep in mind, page speed it important, but it is not something to obsess over! I have seen people spend many hours making performance changes on a site, and only increase it's speed by a few milliseconds. If you have a problem with your site, run a speed test and check for problems. IF you have a page that is very complex, run a speed test to see if you can speed it up a little.

However, most of the time, the largest speed bottlenecks on a site are:

A) Poor programming that is not properly optimized.
B) Slow database connections, or connections left open.
C) Low quality or oversold hosting.