We’re excited to announce the addition of Google’s PageSpeed module to Section’s Edge Compute Platform. PageSpeed provides a large number of front end optimizations that speed up websites by modifying files and applying filters on-the-fly as traffic passes through Section. By adjusting the content that your customers receive, Section delivers a better user experience as customers will see pages earlier, browsers will draw the pages faster and the user will be able to interact with your site more freely.
PageSpeed Front End Optimizations
We talk about backend load time at Section a lot, because it is often slow compared to frontend load time. While we recommend only 20% of total load time is spent in the backend, many leading sites spend 40% or over connecting, fetching the HTML document, and serving it to browsers. This can be dramatically reduced by caching HTML documents, which Section enables users to do.
However, front end load time is equally important. Front end load time includes everything after the HTML document has been served to the browser: images loading, links becoming enabled, and other content appearing. If an image on the homepage takes several seconds to load, users may take that as a sign that a website doesn’t care about user experience or will continue to be slow throughout their browsing experience.
The optimizations PageSpeed offers range from image optimization and compression to CSS minification, lazy loading, and JavaScript optimization. PageSpeed breaks its filters into several general categories, including caching optimizations, minimizing round trip times, minimizing request overhead, minimizing payload size, and optimizing payload size.
Image Optimization with PageSpeed
Here’s an example of what PageSpeed can do without any work needed from you: If you choose to optimize images PageSpeed can extend the cache of images, resize them to the size given in HTML, and recompress to a smaller file type to reduce your total load size. This will improve page load time and provide ecommerce and other sites with additional pageviews, lower bounce rates, and more revenue as a result.
Section users can now run PageSpeed by adding it as a reverse proxy to their Section configuration and deciding which specific filters they want to run on their website. To turn filters on, users simply need to access the PageSpeed file in their config and edit one line of code that includes all the filters you want turned on. PageSpeed will immediately begin to optimize images and enact any filters you have turned on.
To get PageSpeed on Section, contact us or sign up for an account and follow the instructions to add a proxy.
