Don’t take action & this could knock your website offline overnight

Back in 2010 Google announced that website speed was one of the 200 or so key factors it uses to rank pages in search results.

And apart from search engine rankings, another compelling reason to maximise website speed is the fact that faster website performance enhances user experience, meaning faster websites make more money, as we reported back in May last year.

As a result of this, plus the massive growth in mobile devices used to access the web, businesses have increasingly focused on improving website speed.

One way to improve website speed has been to utilise the Google PageSpeed Service which was a service launched by Google in 2010.  This allows a website’s DNS to be hosted on Google’s high speed infrastucture, boosting website page loading speeds.

Being a free, this is a service that many webmasters have taken the opportunity to use.

If you are one of those, then the following is something you need to be aware of, otherwise your site will go offline.

Google has recently announced that they are killing off their PageSpeed Service from Aug 3 and websites using this service must change their DNS settings before then. Sites that don’t will become unavailable after this date which obviously would have disastrous consequences for many websites.

Therefore it would be prudent to check if your site is currently utilising the PageSpeed Service, and if so, change the DNS.

To check, login to the Google APIs Console to see if any of your domains are listed as Enabled. If they are then you need to switch your DNS settings by following the simple instructions outlined here.

Why should you care?

That’s pretty obvious if your site is currently using the Google PageSpeed Service – take no action and your website traffic and resultant sales will disappear overnight on 3 Aug!

So take 2 minutes to check if your site DNS is using the Google PageSpeed Service and if it is, change it.

Other recent search marketing news:

• Google advocating AdWords advertising ahead of SEO
  It’s not surprising Google has this view, given we reckon Google makes around $1M a day in New Zealand from AdWords
• Google says Panda 4.2 update coming this month
  After an eight month hiatus, a new Panda update due this month will re-evaluate content quality.
• Google My Business pages may require re-verification
  Google says businesses that don’t actively maintain their Google My Business pages may have to reverify their pages. But this has a silver lining…

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