Google’s PageSpeed Service, which has pretty much acted like a CDN sans security numerous website owners is now being shut down. Announcing the same via a blog post, Google says that it is planning to “re-focus its efforts elsewhere” and would be pulling the plug on the service on August 3rd.
PageSpeed service has been a Google offering for site optimization for over half a decade. The tool uses a number of basic, yet essential customisation tricks like compressing CSS, HTML or JavaScript files, compressing image and other website files and then delivering the same through Google’s servers to worldwide audience.
This is pretty much what Cloudfare or MaxCDN are offering, the only differentiating factor being security, which the mentioned services provide but Google PageSpeed service didn’t.
So if you happen to be a developer using PageSpeed, you will have to make DNS changes to remove your site safely. The Pagespeed console will offer advice if you try and delete a domain that is live. However, you have a deadline to do all the changes, an that is August 3rd. Post that, all website still using PageSpeed will break.
However, Google is offering you alternatives to Pagespeed so that you don;t have much to change on the server side of things.
For example, the same Google PageSpeed technology is available in a number of alternative packagings which you may wish to consider using. These alternatives are not affected by the deprecation announcement and continue to be supported.
Apart from this, certain web hosts already support PageSpeed and offer modules for the same. If you have such a provider, you can contact their support staff for help.
Google’s pagespeed is also available as server side modules for almost every type out there. Google has developed the open-source Apache module mod_pagespeed. Pre-built binary modules for Apache 2.2 and 2.4 are available. Google has also developed a plugin for Nginx. Due to the nature of Nginx, it must be compiled from source.
For IIS Servers, folks at WeAmp have a commercial port of PageSpeed to Microsoft IIS. WeAmp has also ported PageSpeed to Apache Traffic server. OpenLiteSpeed too supports a PageSpeed module that you can compile and load into your webserver.
As for third party services, Google is currently recommending EdgeCast Edge Optimizer. It integrates Google PageSpeed with their CDN offering.
