Two New Tools From Google Help Speed Up Your Web And Your Website

Google this week introduced two new tools meant to help speed up not only your browsing experience but the browsing experience of visitors to your blogs and websites.

Google Public DNS

Google has launched their own public DNS resolver called Google Public DNS. The goal of Google's new DNS service is to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable.

Google explains: The average Internet user ends up performing hundreds of DNS lookups each day, and some complex pages require multiple DNS lookups before they start loading. This can slow down the browsing experience. Our research has shown that speed matters to Internet users, so over the past several months our engineers have been working to make improvements to our public DNS resolver to make users' web-surfing experiences faster, safer and more reliable. You can read about the specific technical improvements we've made in our product documentation and get installation instructions from our product website.

Google Site Performance

With Google's new Site Performance tool webmasters will see real time how fast their pages load, how they've fared over time, how their site's load times compare to that of other sites, examples of specific pages and their actual page load times, and page speed suggestions that can help reduce user-perceived latency.

The data given is derived from aggregated information sent by users of your site who have installed the Google Toolbar and opted-in to its enhanced features. The tool will only show the performance charts and tables when there's enough data, so not all of them may be shown if your site has little traffic. The data currently represents a global average; a specific user may experience your site faster or slower than the average depending on their location and network conditions.

To get the new tools, install the Firebug add-on and head to the Site Performance section of Google Webmaster Tools. At the bottom of the page you’ll see a button to install the new Firefox plugin. Once installed, head to your site, click the Firebug icon and look for two new tabs: Page Speed and Page Speed Activity.