Google has announced that, after 4.5 years, the PageSpeed Service team will be “refocusing their efforts” and PageSpeed services will be turned down as a result.
PageSpeed Service is a free online service to automatically speed up web pages. Google explains its decision to discontinue the service:
“We see much broader adoption of PageSpeed technology through our open-source products and have therefore decided to focus our efforts on improving those.”
It’s important to note that if you’re currently using Google’s PageSpeed service, you will have to change your DNS by August 2015 otherwise your site will be completely unaccessible.
You can see detailed instructions on how to remove your site from PageSpeed Service here.
If you were enjoying the performance benefits of PageSpeed Service, Google mentions that its same PageSpeed technology is being used by a number of alternative providers.
These following alternatives are not affected by this announcement and will continue to be supported:
- Provider Hosted PageSpeed: Many web hosting providers already integrate PageSpeed. If you are using such a web hosting provider, check your provider’s documentation.
- Server side modules: If you run your own web server, you may have the option to install a PageSpeed module on it.
- Apache: Google has developed the open-source Apache module mod_pagespeed.
- Nginx: Google has also developed a plugin for Nginx. Due to the nature of Nginx.
- IIS: The folks over at WeAmp have a commercial port of PageSpeed to Microsoft IIS.
- Apache Traffic Server: WeAmp has ported PageSpeed to Apache Traffic server.
- OpenLiteSpeed: OpenLiteSpeed supports a PageSpeed module that you can compile and load into your web server.
- Cloud based alternatives: EdgeCast Edge Optimizer integrates Google PageSpeed with their CDN offering
