Google asks users to make the web faster by using Page Speed

Google's blogging about making the web faster, and they're backing it up with Page Speed, a Firefox add-on that makes sure your webpages use best practices to load as quickly as possible. Page Speed was quietly launched earlier this month on the Google Code blog, but now it's mentioned on The Official Google Blog, in a post that lays out some factors that slow down the web, and how Google thinks they can be fixed.

The Google plan for a faster web includes stuff like HTML5 support, more performance diagnostic tools like Page Speed and Yahoo's YSlow, and greater adoption of broadband. So, what are some of the best practices that Page Speed might suggest? Mostly, minor code tweaks like cleaning up your CSS so you only use each declaration once, or removing unnecessary tags from your HTML. There's some more advanced stuff that gets into PHP and JavaScript as well.

One note: Page Speed also requires the Firebug add-on for Firefox, which is very useful in its own right.

Tags: code, google, HTML, optimization, page-speed, web, web-design