When Google launched its PageSpeed service last year, the company's aim was to improve your experience across the web while, reportedly, suspending its own monetary wellbeing. Now, Google has launched an update to the service that promises to get your sites content onto the user screens even faster.
Although the PageSpeed service is still officially in its beta stages and you need to request for an invite before you can get started, the service basically rewrites parts of your site to optimize its loading time. Now, the company's engineers have come up with a number of smart new ways to ensure that sites aren't just downloaded quickly, but also appear on a user's screen as fast as possible.
"We are constantly working on new optimizations (rewriters) that can make pages load even faster. Along these lines, we are introducing a new rewriter called "Cache and Prioritize Visible Content". This rewriter enables users to start interacting with the web page and consuming the content much sooner," said the official Google Developer's Blog. "It accomplishes this by optimizing the page as a whole using the following web page-aware techniques and with minimal configuration needed."
Per the latest update, the PageSpeed service has brought about a number of important and much-needed improvements. The new update has made HTML cacheable. What this means is that this rewriter separates the non-cacheable portions from the HTML and enables caching for the rest of the content on PageSpeed servers. Therefore, when the page has done loading, PageSpeed servers send the cacheable parts immediately while non-cacheable parts are fetched from the origin server and patched into the browser later.
Most web pages, in reality, are not cached because they contain small amounts of personalized information or other non-cacheable data.
What's more, the new update will also prioritize visible content rendering. While rendering of a modern webpage requires several network resources, but not all of them are needed right away, this rewriter automatically determines and prioritizes the content that is above the fold of the browser so that it doesn't have to compete with the rest of the page.
Lastly, now the JavaScript execution is deferred until the page loads so that it doesn't block rendering of visible content.
Joe Malchow, Publisher of Power Line says "With this rewriter the most important bytes, our content, load first and fast. To our readers, Power Line appears to be completely instantaneous, prompting deeper and lengthier reading sessions and more profound engagement with the site."
Note that the rewriter works best when the page content is mostly generated on the server rather than via Javascript and only small portions of it are personalized.
