Google has alerted users of its PageSpeed Service for making websites zippier that it will be killing off the tools as of Aug. 3.
The company, which this week introduced a new offering called Cloud Bigtable for storing large amounts of data online, apparently has bigger things to worry about these days.
Google warns:
After 4.5 years of service, the PageSpeed Service team regretfully decided that the time had come to re-focus their efforts elsewhere and on 5th May announced that PageSpeed Service will be turned down. If you are using PageSpeed Service, you must change your DNS before 3rd August 2015 or your site(s) will become completely unavailable on that date.
Explicit notification will soon be sent to users that we believe are affected, however you should not rely on this! We recommend that you login to the console and look at your list of domains. Anything that shows up as "Enabled" is at risk.
Google had pitched its hosted PageSpeed optimizing proxy (see video below) as a way to improve website performance without having to know any code: Google would do the dirty work of prioritizing and cleaning up the contents of your site to make it load faster. Among other things, PageSpeed would squeeze images and using caching techniques to optimize website performance.
For those who want to continue receiving the benefits of PageSpeed Services, Google suggests alternatives, including the open-source Apache module mod_pagespeed, which Google developed. Google says many web hosting providers offer PageSpeed and notes that PageSpeed web server modules are available to those who run their own servers.
Other offerings that Google this year has announced plans to kill: Google Code software development platform; Google Talk instant messaging for Windows; Maps Coordinate field-worker management service.
