A new Firefox add-on has been made available by Google for the purpose in helping users to speed up their website's performance.

The search engine said it had previously used the Page Speed tool internally to improve its own web pages and is now making it open source so that others can use it.

Page Speed - which integrates with the Firebug add-on - offers website owners suggestions on how to optimise web pages to make them load faster and can automatically tweak images for this purpose.

It additionally looks at JavaScript and CSS that is loaded by the page in question but is not used to display its content, thus helping webmasters to cut down on the amount of time users spend waiting for pages to display.

"At Google, we focus constantly on speed; we believe that making our websites load and display faster improves the user's experience and helps them become more productive," commented Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade of Google's Page Speed team.

According to Patricio Robles of Econsultancy, the tool is likely to be "very useful" and should be looked at by all web development and design professionals.