Last week, Google developers announced version 2.0 of PageSpeed Insights, a Developer Tools Extension for Chrome. This is a useful extension for web developers, which analyzes web pages and suggests useful changes, such as file compression and the deletion of useless code. It also points out unnecessary JavaScript functions which slow down page load times. From the Google Developers blog:

Using technologies like Native Client, PageSpeed Insights is able to run the open-source PageSpeed Insights SDK securely and with the performance of native code. Leveraging the Insights SDK enables the Chrome extension to automatically optimize the images, CSS, JavaScript and HTML resources on your web page and provide versions of those resources that you can easily deploy on your website.

I ran PageSpeed Insights on this site, The Industry. It suggests we enable compression, leverage browser caching, and avoid bad requests. The extension also notified me of the good things this site does, such as specifying image dimensions and serving scaled images.

If you’re a web designer or developer focused on delivering your web pages to browsers quickly, give PageSpeed Insights a try. It’s free, and will significantly and positively impact your website or blog’s load time.